There was some predictable wrangling over which throne Maya would take; as the established Paris couturier with the celebrity father, she naturally felt that she should be in the larger one, but then that was behind the smaller one, and she naturally felt that she should be in front, and would have threatened once again to walk out had one of her minions pointed out that the smaller throne in the front would make her look proportionately large.

Maya sat rigid, staring straight into the camera in order to express her hard, punky, Vivienne Westwood-ish edge. Isabelle relaxed, hitched her legs over the arm of the chair and smiled.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Maya, ‘you’re ruining the composition.’

‘Let’s leave it to the photographer, shall we?’

‘No! This is my shoot, and they’ve only got you along to make me look good.’

‘Really?’ said Isabelle. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Listen, sweetheart,’ said Maya, barely moving her lips as the camera clicked away, ‘if you didn’t play the urban card so effectively, nobody would pay you the slightest bit of attention.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You and Mercy Williams. That’s the only possible reason why she wore that awful tinfoil dress to the Oscars. Because you’re black.’

‘Oh, and I thought it was because of all the kind words you’d been putting in for me with her people,’ said Isabelle, who had not forgotten Maya’s attempts to keep her away from the Academy Awards.

Maya was sweating, and kept being dabbed. She swatted the make-up artists away like flies.

‘God,’ said Maya, ‘I don’t have time to think about people like you. I mean, I’m the one with the career.’

Isabelle laughed out loud when Maya said this, and the photographer chose just that moment to press the shutter. Maya, sweating, frowining and bug-eyed; Isabelle relaxed, laughing, head thrown back.

‘That’s it!’ said the photographer, through the medium of the translator. ‘We’re done here.’ He also made a few other remarks about the relative merits of his two sitters, which the translator thought better to leave in the original Japanese.