‘Could you stop lining up your next shag and help me?’ said Isabelle, who no longer resented Will’s sexual rejection as sharply as she once did, but preferred not to be left alone while he followed butch little runners towards the toilets. ‘This is supposed to be about furthering our career, not your love life.’

She’d given up on Will, and much else, during the interminable forty-eight hours that she’d spent in hospital. Oh, he’d been there beside her, of course – he was her right hand man, her best friend, never too tired to get her a magazine or some fresh fruit, coping with her grouchy come-down with his usual even temper. He didn’t even tell her off for the massive drug consumption and borderline anorexia that landed her there in the first place. He made little jokes about it, cut it down to size, dissipated the shame like a struck match disip-pates the smell of a fart. Other people visited, of course – father, mother, brother, a few friends – but nobody else called her a coke-addled slapper or pinched her bum under the covers or gave unkind names to the nurses and patients like Will did.

He’d given her so much – he’d saved her life, really – but there was one thing he would never give her, and that was himself. Whatever it was that made his pants swell up and propelled them on to the mattress had gone, just a passing phase, something to be laughed off. ‘Oh God no,’ she would say, perhaps in interviews, ‘we got all that out of the way years ago. Friends are so much more important than lovers, aren’t they? Will’s part of my life, it would be like incest!’ – great soundbites, fun for parties, end of story.

Of course, that left Isabelle alone, boyfriendless, at a time when she could do with arms around her at night, a sympathetic ear, someone to love . . . But she’d have to face that emptiness and fill it with work, rather than cocaine. Another soundbite. ‘Drugs? They’re everywhere in the fashion world. Been there, done that, had the near-death experience. I prefer limos to ambulances these days.’ Edgy. Experienced. Urban. The grit beneath that glamour, and so on. Very Cissé.