I have been doing my best Anita Ekberg. It’s too beautiful here. I will undoubtedly be bored and lonely on my return. Please come to London soon.

Lissa meets her at Euston, wearing jeans and scuffed sneakers. She is tanned and her hair is loose. Hannah herself is scratchy with self-consciousness. She has recently had her hair cut in a close bob; her hand moves often to the place where the hair tapers to a sharp point at her neck.

“Wow.” Lissa greets her on the concourse with a hug. “Louise Brooks. I love it.”

“Really?” says Hannah, touching her hand to the nape of her neck.

They wait outside King’s Cross station for the bus, and when it arrives Hannah follows Lissa as she runs up the back stairs. The seat at the front is free and Lissa grabs it, swinging her sneakered feet up onto the rail, chattering away, as the bus takes them through the wastelands behind King’s Cross, where Lissa points out warehouses where she has gone to parties, a club that she goes to most weekends. She tells Hannah about her new boyfriend—Declan—an Irishman ten years older than her. Of how he took her to Rome, where he is filming a series, and they wandered the sound stages of Cinecittà, and stayed in an apartment in Trastevere and saw medieval paintings and religious shrines.

“Declan says he’s going to get me an agent,” says Lissa. “So I can go up for things during the holidays.”

She says this with no particular surprise, just a happy acceptance of her lot.

And Hannah watches Lissa as she speaks and thinks she is more beautiful, if possible, than before. Lissa will be a successful actress. This is clear. She might even be a star. She has talent and looks and insouciance and golden things fall into her lap. And there is no point envying her, for this is simply how it is.

Outside the bus window the industrial land gives way to public housing areas, as the bus climbs a long hill. They get off the bus opposite a tube station, and Lissa leads the way through streets where tall houses are set back from the road and Hannah can hear music practice through open windows. These streets are quiet, the city softened. They stop at a house with hollyhocks in the front garden and a battered, green front door.

Your room’s at the top of the stairs at the back, says Lissa, letting them in. You can put your bag up there if you like.