‘Avoiding your mother,’ he answered, sombre. He signalled to the barman for a drink, a gesture that seemed to transform him from a boy to a man. When had he started doing that? Alice put a hand on his arm.

‘Well, I can’t argue with that, but there’s no time for a drink. Come on, let’s get this over with.’

‘This is all your fault, you know. Why couldn’t you have debuted in London like everyone else? Always got to be different, haven’t you?’ He looked skyward, as if praying for something. Divine intervention from tonight, perhaps.

Alice had been asking herself the same thing. She’d liked the idea of being more anonymous in Paris, of not feeling like she was being sized up against her contemporaries when she’d spent her whole life doing that herself. And of course Mummy was thrilled with the suggestion, immediately tapping into her extensive network of influential friends to secure her, and Teddy, an invitation – but rather than making her feel less visible, as she’d hoped, the new surroundings were having the opposite effect. At least she knew where she was in London. At least she could chatter her way around the room, outrunning her nervousness, and duck off somewhere with Lulu and talk about how unflattering her pale lilac-blue lace dress was and yes, Lulu often made her feel a hundred times worse, but at least the whole scene would be familiar. She wouldn’t feel the rising sense of being adrift that she was experiencing here.

‘She’s wearing yellow, apparently. The Frenchie. Nina Laurent. So she shouldn’t be too hard to spot.’ His mouth formed a line of distaste, as though he’d eaten something sour. Alice didn’t answer but obviously she hoped Nina Laurent was a total bitch and ugly to boot. Her mother’s wish had been for Teddy to be her cavalier, but Alice had prayed for the formidable Madame Chapelle, le Bal’s imperious organiser, to allocate her someone else and her prayers had been answered, in the form of a tall, fair, serious-looking Swiss count. ‘Sounds delightful, doesn’t she?’

Alice shrugged.

‘I met the count earlier,’ he added, in a teasing tone and with a look on his face which said: lucky you. She rolled her eyes. She’d already had her fill of jokes from her father, whose only contribution to this evening, beyond attending as a lord himself, had been a steady stream of puns: I bet you’re counting down the days! You can count on it!

Their attention shifted as another debutante crossed the lobby. Alice looked around furtively, nervous of reproach from Madame Chapelle if they were spotted. The debutantes weren’t supposed to be out here, they were meant to be tucked away, hidden like precious jewels about to go up for auction, but every now and then a gem escaped, gliding across the lobby to speak to a parent or whisper something to a sibling. Alice wished she had a sister here to talk to. Not Teddy, whom her mother had taken under her wing when his parents died ten years earlier.