Leo, their host, shook his head impatiently. ‘I just don’t think we can begin to understand what the world might look like to someone without certain basic advantages. And I’m not just talking financially.’

Tamsin had been stuck in this conversation for over twenty minutes and she was bored. Neither the girl, whom she didn’t like, nor Leo, whom she did, had thought to ask her opinion at any point. She went to drink her wine but her glass was empty. Callum was nowhere to be seen.

‘Tamsin Jarvis! Looking as ravishing as ever!’

Will Heatherington inserted himself between the girl and Tamsin and deposited a loud kiss on each of Tamsin’s cheeks. He was one of Callum’s closest friends; for three years at Cambridge, they had been on the university water polo team together.

For once, Tamsin was pleased to see Will. She actually knew him independently of Callum: his family had lived near hers in Holland Park, and Tamsin had encountered Will at intervals throughout her childhood, mostly at their parents’ parties. She remembered him as a boisterous teenager, teasing her unkindly about her skinny legs. Now thirty-two, Will was good-looking in the most obvious way: tall, with naturally olive skin, glossy dark blond hair, Bambi eyes and strong cheekbones. He could have been a mid-nineties boy-band pin-up. Only the full mouth was out of register. There was a hint of the predator about his pout, a complacency that was somehow aggressively expectant.

‘Tamsin, you’re dry, we can’t have that.’ Will produced a bottle of champagne and started to fill her glass. These days he was scrupulously polite to Tamsin; but there was always something in his tone that gave her the impression he was secretly laughing at her. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Leo, I invited some reinforcements for later. Including two hot lesbians,’ he went on, turning to the girl in the blood-stained tank top.

‘I’m not gay any more,’ she said.

Will grinned and ruffled her carefully styled hair, which was already sparked with grey at the sides. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it, darling.’

‘Reinforcements, yes, that’s fine,’ said Leo, detaching himself from the little group. ‘Sorry – got to go rescue Bex – she’s been cornered by those orthopods she was too nice not to invite—’

‘Sooooo,’ said Will, resting one forearm on Tamsin’s shoulder and the other on the un-lesbian lesbian’s, as if they were all jolly chums. ‘Isn’t this nice? Leo and Bex, the beating of two tender hearts as one, the unimpeded marriage of true minds, etcetera, etcetera?’

‘Mmmm,’ said Tamsin, who never quite knew how to respond to Will’s florid speaking style.

‘Talking of true love,’ he went on, ‘has my secretary managed to keep her paws off your boyfriend?’

‘Leah’s not your secretary,’ Tamsin replied evenly. She was remembering why she disliked Will so much.