Chapter 6

The sky is blue in Soho this morning, and the sun casts a clear clean light across a street lined with fabric shops, one after the other, their fronts thrown open and piled high with rolls of cotton and acrylic, satin and lace. The food stalls are still skeletons, too early to be stacked with vats, rolls and wraps for the lunchtime crowd. Soho’s entertainment village is populated by film execs whose heads are full of the edit, TV producers whose minds are bending with budget cuts and the interns in Converse and skinny jeans feeling so hashtag-blessed.

Becky kicks through a messy pile of plane tree bark and fuzz balls on the pavement outside the office, a red-brick townhouse on a square just south of tourist-choked Oxford Street. Her tired eyes itch with pollen and pollution, her nerves still jangling after Maisie’s disgruntled departure for the school bus.

Over the years she has worked for Matthew, she has perfected the art of placating him, knowing whether his grumps are down to hunger or thirst or aggravation with a bullish agent who is fighting for more money and more rights. She takes satisfaction in the feeling that she is somehow unique, being both soother and gatekeeper for a man as special as he. But being the cause of Matthew’s problems? That’s new to her.

How will he raise it with her? ‘Last night, as I was shagging a young woman on my rug …?’ Will he take her aside and say they like rough sex? What is the etiquette here?

Siobhan is standing at the bottom of the staircase ready to greet her, clasping a telephone in each hand. ‘Am I glad to see you? Yes, I am,’ she says. ‘He’s been on my back and now he’s locked himself in his office again and I’ve got about forty things that need his attention. I’m going to make him an extra-milky coffee and slip a beta blocker in there.’

Becky likes to think that Siobhan is still mostly pleased for her about Medea going on the slate, because they went to the pub a few days after it happened and drank too many pints and Siobhan proposed a toast of congratulation before going on to say how much she needed to change her life so she didn’t feel such a failure. She came in with white-blonde hair the next day and that seemed to settle it.