Rose is different, of course. Rose seems to glide through things, not wanting, just accepting. She has a wonderful calm to her. Titch wonders whether going through what she has been through has made her more grateful, more willing to just be in the moment, without grasping all the time for the main chance.

It’s that grasping quality she really hates. She knows she’s not free of it herself, and that her magazine has a role in stoking that acquisitiveness. But maybe there’s still time for a rethink. Sometimes the world seems so fast, and so cruel. All the bulletins every night on the news, the inequality, the rapaciousness – and underneath, the ominous drumbeat of climate change. Surely we can’t just carry on having more stuff, more people, more growth? Every day it seems more of an effort to persuade herself that things are going to be OK.

And then she leaves London and she feels, here, with the smell of hay in the air, and the lush hedgerows, and the sense of layers of history held together by a community, that there might be a better way to live. An ordinary, everyday kind of life. Sustainable.

In the churchyard, she wonders sometimes about just retreating. Leaving them to fight it out, and living out here, simply, quietly. Spending her time doing good things – small, good things. Eating organic. She doesn’t need much, she thinks. She doesn’t need holidays, or Michelin-starred meals, or film premieres.

Just her little cottage.

The roses give a faint scent as she walks up the path. Flowers. If you could have a garden, that might be enough. She imagines herself, an old lady on her lawn, daisies at her feet.

She turns the key. She walks through the hall, and into the living room.

She sees Aaron first. He stands between the kitchen and the sofa. He’s wearing a grey tracksuit, muddy and sagging at the knees. His trainers are black, his socks are grey school socks. He’s tall, skinny, dirty. He has jam on his face, and is spooning it out of a jar. He looks at her, spoon in hand. His eyes are raw, and his mouth slack. He looks like some kind of goblin.

She freezes. Then, when he does nothing, she says, quietly, ‘What are you doing?’

Aaron turns towards his sister. She steps out from the kitchen.

‘Oh,’ says Titch.

Rose looks at her. Titch looks back.

Rose wants to smile, but the smile won’t come. So she stares. She stares at Titch’s careful makeup, her lined face, the smooth, neat ugliness of her clothes. And Titch stares back at the coiled, dirty beauty of Rose.

The two of them stare for so long that suddenly Rose wonders if Titch doesn’t recognise her.

‘It’s Rose,’ says Rose.

She waits, uncertain now if Titch has even heard her.