Incurring her mother’s distaste made Georgie feel powerful. She discovered that money was a fortress that protected you from what other people thought. And it had been fabulous, in the early years. They’d travelled and, because Duncan was extravagant and considered himself a gourmet, they’d eaten in all the best restaurants. Their picture had appeared occasionally in Nigel Dempster’s column. They had glamorous people over to dinner, actors and designers. And then all at once Duncan started to say he had to be away for work. Sometimes he didn’t appear for days at a time. Georgie wasn’t stupid, she could read the signs. There had been many nights of tears, recriminations. After they got the Wiltshire house for weekends he might announce over breakfast on a Saturday that something had come up at work and he had to go back to London. Georgie would be left alone with Jake. When she looked back on that time, she didn’t remember being a family. Her abiding image was of her by herself, constantly changing Jake’s footwear: stuffing his plump little feet into their shiny blue gumboots, doing up Start-Rite sandals or jelly shoes while the child looked on, solemnly, as if his own feet had nothing to do with him.

Duncan was never unkind to her. He didn’t say nasty things or shout or throw plates. She’d have preferred all that, in a way. What he did was simply withdraw his attention from her. To begin with it had been as if he’d been a spotlight and she the only player on the stage. She had felt so vital, so attractive, while she existed in the beam of his desire. But then he’d switched the light out; or more accurately, fixed it on other things: his work, women. Duncan had always been impulsive and restless and at first Georgie had taken these qualities as a sign that he was somehow more than other people: more alive, more intense, more exciting. Later she came to change her mind. To always want new things, new shiny things: wasn’t that really just the behaviour of someone very spoilt?