Now, almost subliminally, individual voices started to resolve out of the thrum from the table before her, as if they had been amplified. (They have, Petra.) A man raised his hand and clicked his fingers. Her cue, she guessed. She stiffened, then turned to grab the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket, and as she did, she felt a pull and pinch on her stomach, the fabric of her cotton shirt tugging painfully at her skin. Looking down, she saw three thin stripes of bright blood scoring the blouse, the grazes from her fall and slide sucking to the cotton. She adjusted the costume’s apron to cover the wounds, took the bottle and approached the end of the table now highlighted by a murky blue spotlight.

‘Don’t know what she’s doing here,’ the man was saying in an actor’s projected tones. He was young, playing a student, but with the tone of someone who had never doubted himself. ‘Doesn’t seem to be her thing.’

The young woman next to him turned and glared as the blue light came up to full, cold white – it was Olivia, her orange curls and green dress perfectly matching the prawn and avocado cocktail in front of her, her green-painted fingernails like garnishing. ‘She’s right here, Curtis.’ She reached her hand towards the woman sitting next to her. The woman barely responded, looking down disengaged at her plate. And when she finally raised her head into the light, Petra recognised the dancer, Rashida, in her teal satin gown, the most elegant person at this table but crumpling into a void of self-consciousness.

‘He’s right. I shouldn’t have come,’ Rashida said to Olivia, looking younger, her voice shy and inflected with a regional accent that Petra could only assume marked her out in some obscure way, opened her up to ridicule by these privileged men.

‘Oh, nonsense. You have as much right as anyone to be here.’ Under the table, seen only by Petra, Olivia took Rashida’s hand. ‘Don’t listen to them, Ida.’

Ida? Is that where she’d seen the woman? How could this gowned debutante be the same middle-aged woman who’d inserted herself into her mother’s life? Could she possibly be the same hollow-eyed woman she’d seen in her mother’s lobby? She made an effort to strip away the hair and the make-up, trying to recall the contours, any memorable feature, but like Olivia’s, her face was an infinitely mutable canvas.