And it was going to be a surprise – ‘a revelation’, Will said, after the final run-through with the producers. There was no talk, this time round, of cutting corners or calling in favours from friends. This time, they’d gone straight to the best, no expense spared, and the best were more than willing to work with them. True, if they’d known the parlous state of Cissé’s finances, they might have been a little less eager. Will was far from sure that he’d be able to pay for everything, come invoice time – but he was willing to take a gamble. If the show went well, orders would come in at such a rate that the coffers would be overflowing, whether Rivelli paid up or not. Success of the scale that Will anticipated was better than money in the bank. It gave leverage.

But without the clothes . . .

‘Don’t worry, Princess,’ said Will. It sounded as if he was outdoors; she could hear traffic, the occasional siren, even though it was the middle of the night. ‘The collection will be there in time for the show. I stake my right ball on it.’

He rang off, and Isabelle slept for a few more hours, better sleep than she’d had for days.

But now she must get up and get dressed and get down to the museum for a full day of press and photo calls and backstage panics and breakdowns and air kisses. And she still didn’t know what she would find there.

There was a full programme of events in the BFC tent from nine a. m. onwards. Crowds ebbed and flowed in the morning, then flowed without ebbing from about noon, when the first of the big names was up. From that point on, it was a furious buzz of activity, like a well dressed anthill; if you’d viewed it all in slow-motion you might have been able to make some sense out of what was going on, but to the naked eye it seemed like highly coloured chaos. Every hour or so there was a blur of movement around the front-row seats, which were vacated and swiftly cleaned by a little army of fashion students, getting some valuable practice for the type of career that lay ahead for so many of them.

The Cissé show was the highlight of the day – not officially, as the last evening slot was reserved for a designer who had been hot stuff in the eighties and still managed to command crowds, if not headlines. But everyone knew that the seven o’clock slot was the one to watch, the one towards which all the others were building, after which anything would be an anticlimax. It allowed the journalists enough time to file their diary pieces for tomorrow’s papers, and it allowed the models enough time to change, stick their fingers down their throats and take their drugs in time for the after parties.