Thea’s part-time job at a high street photographer’s was not one which was ever going to bring her much in the way of job satisfaction. Sending off other people’s holiday snaps and handing them back twenty-four hours later was not intrinsically interesting. She had realised that going for that particular job was a mistake the moment she had first made coffee for everyone. But because in a previous life she had been a photographer it had seemed natural, although she now knew that selling cheap imported clothes to bo-hos and second-time-around hippies would have been much more fun.

But while she often inspected cards put up in other shop windows and turned to the jobs page in the local paper, she couldn’t quite summon up the energy to find anything more challenging. It was to do with the lassitude that had begun to affect her lately; she wasn’t happy with her life, but hadn’t the initiative to do anything much to change it. Perhaps an art appreciation tour in France would give her the necessary prod.

It would have been an overstatement to say that Thea’s ‘life’ and the ‘love of it’ had both deserted her at the same time, but she had hoped the man in question would turn into a partner – or even a husband.

She had been a photojournalist, just making her name, and what had happened was hurtful and humiliating, but the worst part was that her female photographer friends all told her it was her fault.

They had bullied the story out of her three days after her arrival at the door of one of them, late one evening, asking if she could stay the night. After three days of seeing Thea in her pyjamas watching Channel 5, the friend, who wanted her sofa back, called in reinforcements. Ordered to get dressed, she was frogmarched to a local pub where they could straighten her out in peace, accompanied by tequila slammers.

After they’d heard that she and Conrad had broken up (which they’d guessed), they moved on to the reason why. And, to a professional, hard-boiled woman, they condemned her as a naïve amateur.

‘I know,’ she admitted, finishing her slammer. ‘I’ve got so much egg on my face I can hardly see out.’

‘I could do with egg like that,’ said Zelda, a model who had moved round to the other side of the camera. ‘How much did you get as a thank you present?’

Thea repeated the amount, although they all knew perfectly well by now. ‘I feel bad about accepting it, but Anna insisted. She told me that I’d given her much more than money could ever buy and that being generous involved receiving as well as giving. I thought it was rather sweet.’

The women’s collective expression told Thea they found it rather nauseous, actually, but they didn’t comment.