She said nothing to her family. She couldn’t face the humiliation, her mother crowing to have been right about him all along. Once Jake started at school she began training as a voice coach. She didn’t have the appetite to go back into acting: in any case, she wanted work that could be fitted in around her son. It had been her desire to keep up with Cass that had originally got Georgie into doing accents. Cass was only an occasional mimic, but she could just get someone, their voice, their mannerisms. Seeing her sister gather approval and laughter had made Georgie want to emulate this talent. It was ridiculous, really, to want to impersonate the impersonator. But at drama school she’d found that she loved voice sessions the most. The way you could alter the set of your jaw to get at a voice; by the smallest adjustment of the palate the words came out so differently. The way you put your lips together, flat, like a carp, to enunciate a final consonant. Controlling the breath. How one word could be the key into a character’s way of speaking. Now she discovered that she had a gift for helping others to capture patterns of speech. And from the speech came the character. Once someone had the voice, they were able to access everything else that they needed to inhabit another person: the movements, the motivation.

Duncan left her when Jake was in his teens. At least the girl in question was a completely different type from herself: she was spared the cliché of being thrown over for an identikit younger version. Unlike her predecessor, Georgie took away the sculpted head of Duncan which her father had made: Nick had died suddenly, of an unsuspected heart condition, and she was glad to have work of his. The head reminded her of her father more than it did her husband. She didn’t mind seeing it every day. Her pride was injured, there was humiliation, but she wasn’t heartbroken to find herself alone. The hurt had happened long before, when she first became aware of his infidelities. He’d left without leaving long before the real split took place. He’d wanted to keep on the London mews and the house near Tisbury and she hadn’t put up a fight. It was always easier to let him have his own way. He’d given her a cash sum and she’d bought herself the place in Fulham and had some money to spare. You could say what you liked about Duncan, but he’d never been stingy.