‘When she told me her name,’ she said in a flat, unemotional voice, ‘I suddenly knew what was coming. So, with hindsight, I guess you could say there must have been warning signals but I was so dumb I didn’t pick them up. She was his daughter. The reason he’d never “remarried” was because he already was married – with five children. And as far as his daughter was concerned, very happily married too. “You’d just love my parents,” she said. “My dad often goes over to London on business. I must have him call you up.” I don’t know what excuse I made to get away before lunch was over but I never told her I was her father’s mistress . . . I went home and took an overdose instead.’

‘Thank God someone must have found you in time! Did you really mean to kill yourself?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I meant to do it all right.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I was staying in my father’s New York apartment and he’d gone down to Long Island where we have a house. I knew my stepmother had a stash of sleeping tablets in the bathroom closet so I took the lot . . . but she had a dental appointment or something and unexpectedly came back and found me, only just in time. What followed was a nightmare. Stomach pumps. Doctors. Hospitalisation – and questions, questions, questions. I felt as if I was being turned inside out. I had a complete breakdown and a spell in a clinic.’

‘Oh, Marnie, I’m so very sorry.’ Christopher leaned forward, put his arms round her and pulled her back against him. She felt like a coiled spring. He held her close, occasionally rocking her slightly as one might comfort a frightened child, longing to hold her even closer but not wanting to break the flow of her reminiscences.

‘I know now,’ she whispered at last, ‘that what I did was cowardly and wrong and gave a lot of people a load of anguish and trouble. I’m probably not the person you thought I was at all.’

‘Oh, but I think you are,’ he said. ‘I think you’re brave and kind and funny – and beautiful, and very, very special. We all have secrets and put on disguises to hide from the outside world. It’s a question of finding the person on the inside.’

‘Odd you should say that, because in her diary the Contessa wrote that old age was like a disguise. She felt she’d become invisible – no one saw who she was any more.’

‘Like wearing a mask?’ he suggested. ‘Like your carnival dancers. Was it the thought of them that panicked you so much about dancing the reels? I knew it was something more than fear of making a fool of yourself by not knowing the steps.’