After a time, the taxi driver said, ‘Have you got plans, love? I promised the wife I’d be home for midnight so we’d see it in together. For the kids, you know. Have you got any children yourself?’

Hélène crumpled the telegram in her hand. All of those nights, waltzing in the ballroom. All of those afternoons demonstrating dances alongside Raymond de Guise. All of those dignitaries and statesmen who requested her by name when they came to grace the Buckingham Hotel. What was it all for, if not this? She closed her eyes and, fleetingly, imagined life as it might have been: she and Sidney and Sybil, in a little house of their own. In her mind, Sybil was toddling along a burgundy carpet, and Hélène was in the kitchen – no longer a dancer, nor a model staring out of the pages of a magazine. Simply a mother. An ordinary, decent, loving mother . . .

The taxi driver was waiting. Hélène steeled herself. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘let me . . .’

She was fumbling in the pocket of her woollen coat for whatever payment she could find, when the taxi driver put his hand over hers and whispered, ‘Off with you, now. You don’t owe me a penny. Happy New Year, Miss.’

Moments later, Hélène heard the car wheels whining as the driver took off. She stood in the snow and looked up at the face of the house, afraid of what she might find.

She knocked.

She knocked again.

She knocked, harder and harder, so hard that lights came on in the neighbouring houses.

Her heart was beating a thousand different rhythms.

There came a clatter of footsteps on the other side of the door and it drew open, spilling the light from within. Noelle Archer was standing there with the most inscrutable expression, as if she hadn’t expected Hélène at all.

‘Noelle, I got your message. Am I . . . Am I too late? Noelle, is she…’

Hélène wanted to say more, but the cold had robbed her of all breath. She strode through, Noelle’s face opening wide as she floundered past, and took off up the hall . . .

. . . and there lay Sybil in her crib, softly snoring in her sleep.

Hélène was hanging over the crib, unable to understand, when Noelle and Maurice appeared in the doorway behind her.

‘Hélène?’ Noelle gasped. ‘What’s happened? Why aren’t you dancing?’

Hélène reached into the crib and put the back of her frigid hand to Sybil’s head – but her daughter slept soundly, without any fever at all.

The baby opened her eyes. It took her a moment to take in the scene around her. Then, when her eyes found her mother, Sybil began to babble, reaching out with both pudgy arms.

‘Dadadadadadadadadaaaa!’