‘I don’t have my own children,’ Blake, the world’s most famous bachelor, said. ‘But I like your style, Sue. I don’t think I have ever met someone who is so dedicated to casting as you.’ He smiled, and Sue blushed again, but this time the flush was not confined to her face.

‘What is going on?’ An Eastern European accent heralded the arrival of a woman at least fifteen years Sue’s junior, if not more, who strolled into the living room wearing nothing but a man’s shirt, her long tanned legs bare. ‘You said you’d come back to bed in ten minutes?’ The younger woman tossed her golden locks over her shoulder. ‘This the new cleaning woman?’

‘Oh, I …’ Sue stood again. ‘It’s barely gone four in the afternoon. I didn’t imagine you’d be … sleeping.’

‘You English, you are all so frigid,’ the girl said. ‘Like icicles, no?’

‘Well, anyway, it was just a thought, a silly one.’ Flustered, Sue attempted to leave, heading in the direction of what she thought was the exit, soon realising that the perfectly symmetrical and minimalistic design of the house had foxed her, and she had utterly lost her bearings. Instead she had walked to the rear of the house, which overlooked the ocean. Though in the fading light of a winter afternoon she was confronted with a wall of darkness, revealing nothing except her own reflection, and somewhere beyond the promise of a cliff edge. Sue looked hard at herself, at her scruffy hair, and jeans, her ancient walking books, her skin ruddy and bare of any make-up and realised with a sudden cold wash of horror how foolish she looked, walking into the middle of all this glamour and luxury like these people were just people. Blake Fletcher and his girlfriend must think she was ridiculous. She bet they couldn’t wait for her to leave so they could laugh their heads off about the silly frumpy Cornish woman. Tears threatened and Sue bit her lip, she was not going to cry in front of these people.

Further down the coastline Ruan and Alex’s Thorne’s lighthouse stood lit up like a friendly beacon and she felt heartened, simply knowing that it contained people she counted as friends. Poldore was her town; it had been her town for eight hundred years. She wasn’t going to let some rent-a-supermodel and a jumped-up movie star make her feel any less of a woman than she already did.

‘Lovely view,’ she said, seeing Blake’s reflection behind her. ‘Or at least it would be if I could see it. Do you know, when I was a little girl, I used to come up here with my dogs, all day sometimes in the summer? And now there are security fences and CCTV and you only get to see this view if you’ve got a few million to spare.’