‘Your name is Vivienne. I’ll call you Vivienne. Vivienne, you can summon Mr Charles. You can make it so that I never set foot in the Buckingham Hotel. It doesn’t matter to me. All that matters is . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Would you put them down, Vivienne? You don’t need to do this. You’re better than it. Stronger.’

‘Stronger?’ she gasped. ‘Better? What does it even mean? I am what I am. Look at me. Here I am. This is me. This is all there is.’

Nancy inched around the edge of the bed. ‘That isn’t it at all. That stuff in your hand, it’s not you. I said it to my father once and I’ll say it to you now. You can take those powders, or you can throw them away, be done with them forever. That choice – that’s what you are.’

Vivienne wheeled around. The top of her dresser was a chaos of Maybelline face powders and Guerlain lipsticks, the bottle of Chanel, all the little odds and ends she’d been given for Christmas. She swept it all aside, glass shattering and powders puffing into the air as the bottles and boxes hit the floor. Then, settling down, she took the stoppers out of each of the phials and carefully laid a trail of the white powder on the surface of the wood.

Nancy dared come no closer. There was a look of such concentration on Vivienne’s face.

‘You didn’t deserve it,’ Nancy blurted out.

Vivienne froze.

‘Nathaniel White. He used you to get into the ballroom. He cheated and he connived. You didn’t matter to him. Nobody does. And Vivienne – you didn’t deserve it.’ She enunciated the last words so clearly that they seemed to punch their way through Vivienne’s armour. She turned away from the intoxicating drug for the first time. ‘You’ve been resisting it, haven’t you?’ Nancy ventured. ‘Billy Brogan procured you those drugs before Christmas. And that means . . . You want to stop, don’t you? You know you nearly died right here – right here on this carpet! – and you want to stop.’

‘I should have died here,’ Vivienne trembled. ‘If it wasn’t for you, I would have. And then I wouldn’t feel like this, would I? I wouldn’t feel anything at all. And God knows, I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to feel a thing . . .’

Nancy had been holding back, but something told her that now was the moment. She stepped forward, sat on the bed at Vivienne’s side.

‘Why would you help me? Why would you pick me up off this carpet? What are you doing here, even now? I was horrible to you. I was wicked.’