I sat up, gingerly moving the legs of the man sharing my sofa with me. Sleeping guests were strewn around the room like bunting. The servants were up already – or perhaps they hadn’t gone to bed – quietly sweeping up broken glass and mopping up spills and vomit.

I stumbled through the main bedroom, past a bed full of naked, sweaty bodies, shut myself in Edie’s bathroom and washed my face, then ran a wet hand through my hair, smoothing it down. I had to look presentable when I returned home. There was nothing I could do about my eyes however; they looked different, older. I was different, older; a man for real.

From behind me a bell rang, high and clear.

‘Breakfast,’ Edie called, and I realised I was starving.

Chapter Nine

After the party, Rupert began calling on Sylvie and Nicolas at least once a week. He was twenty-six years old, he told us, an English aristocrat recently returned from Argentina.

‘Were you farming out there?’ Nicolas asked.

‘Amusing myself,’ Rupert said. ‘And running up large bills.’

‘I bet you were,’ Sylvie said, smiling her special smile.

He wore five gold rings, presents from female admirers, and all his stories involved broken-hearted women and irate husbands. ‘Love ’em and leave ’em,’ he said. ‘That’s the only way to do it. No woman’s ever going to get her claws into me.’ Sylvie sat up straighter when he said that.

When he wasn’t talking, he had a habit of tapping his teeth with his fingernails, distracting whoever else was talking, and when he wasn’t doing that he was chain-smoking or arguing. He was the opposite of Freddie, I thought, who radiated energy. Rupert sucked it out of everyone.

Nicolas didn’t seem to notice anything at first, but after a while his face fell whenever we heard Rupert’s Buick pulling up outside the house.

‘Freddie is married,’ he said to me. ‘But Rupert’s a bachelor – that’s the problem.’

Maud stopped visiting after Rupert began showing up. I understood – watching Sylvie laughing at his jokes, or listening wide-eyed to his rants, made me think I didn’t know her at all. It burned me to see Rupert ignore her all afternoon, how it only made her more desperate for his attention.

‘It’s hard for him, you know, being so much cleverer than everyone else,’ she said once, when I pointed out how rude he’d been that afternoon. ‘He doesn’t think about trivial things. And he’s just playing for the audience. He can be sensitive too.’

I wasn’t sure he was any cleverer than Nicolas. I could tell there was a competitiveness between them, but Rupert only won more often because he shouted louder.

Freddie didn’t seem to mind him. Rupert was good at impressions as well. Sometimes they held entire conversations as other people. Rupert’s were more insulting.