‘Oh, Tommy, you’re priceless, do you know that? Of course it’s perverted! That’s what makes the films a guaranteed money-spinner! Think about it. There’ve always been dirty pictures, silly naughty postcards with half-dressed women, that sell for a small fortune. Our boys even took them off to war with them. Where’s the harm? In our houses we have paintings everywhere of couples having it off, they’re part and parcel of the fixtures and fittings, so it seems logical to me to take it one step further. Moving pictures are what people want. All it takes is some girl flashing her clout and some bloke enjoying himself, and we’re made. It’s no different to what we do already.’

Tommy could see the logic of her argument, he was honest enough to admit that. It was more the fact Rupert Charles had approached Briony direct, as opposed to himself, that was the bug bear. But whatever way he looked at it all, the pictures - well, they didn’t seem right.

Briony watched him battling it out with himself and felt the familiar annoyance. Every time they ventured into a new area it was the same unless: Tommy thought of it first, then she was expected just to nod and go along with whatever he decided. When she thought of something it was days of discussing the pros and cons, Tommy humming and hahing, working out the costs, the overheads, the benefit it would be to the business. She knew that at times she made him feel inferior. She didn’t mean to, but the fact would always remain that she was much quicker on the uptake than he. He would be the eternal heavy. She was the real brains behind them. Artfully, she tried a different tack.

‘Listen to this, Tommy.’ She picked up a newspaper beside her and began to read: “‘Josephine Baker, the sensational nineteen-year-old dancer of La Revue Nègre, is the talk of Paris. Her Charleston, slapping her buttocks in time to ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!‘, and her bare-breasted mating dance, wearing nothing but strategic circles of coloured feathers, arouses audiences to frenzy. Colette calls her ‘a most beautiful panther‘, Picasso calls her ‘the Nefertiti of today‘, and Anita Loos speaks of her ‘witty rear end’. Poiret and Schiaparelli are designing clothes for her, painters are begging her to sit for them and the Folies Bergères are wooing her to join the show ...”’

Tommy interrupted her.

‘What’s she got to do with all this?’