In this crescent the sun shone in through long windows across wooden tables and comfortable chairs; in the evening tasteful lampshades reflected light on to people who had money. The grey-haired woman, the neighbours saw, painted her walls and window-frames very slowly, very meticulously, but had very little furniture yet in her front room. Just one wing-backed chair that they could see. One or two of them had been told her name: Nicola Abbott; one man thought he vaguely knew the name, couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

Nicky Abbott painted, very slowly, the house of her dreams.

She knew that he would come.

*

Back in her large penthouse that overlooked Central Park in New York where the doors were only opened by combination codes and where security guards were always on duty downstairs, a woman woke in the night, screaming out before she realised where she was. It was the smell that haunted her: not of Dior and Calvin Klein but of garlic, and stale sweat, and the smell of the sheets. And the whisky.

And at the end of that week, one week after the reunion, Simone Taylor, who used to lean on the piano and sing Judy Garland songs and who lived in a country where giving confessional interviews was really part of the show business to which she had always dreamt of belonging, gave an interview to the New York Post. Her business colleagues in New York read her interview with utter amazement. They became deeply embarrassed at her revelations, didn’t know what to say to her, cleared their throats anxiously when she came into a room, began treating her like an ageing, fragile doll.

*

When her husband, a Wall Street banker, left her for a younger woman after twenty years of childless marriage, Simone Taylor was given anti-depressants. And it was to Terence Blue, her old obsession, that she turned for solace. In her mind.

She was a very clever businesswoman.

Competitors were fooled by the little-girl voice, didn’t take her seriously, next thing they knew they had been subject to a takeover bid and no longer had a company. Her business colleagues found her energy exhausting, and her little-girl voice extremely irritating; they nevertheless admired her business acumen and were sometimes rather afraid of her. There was something almost demonic about the way she took over company after company, especially after her divorce. She had many important contacts and many important acquaintances.

But no close friends, who might have said to her: What are you doing Simone?

STAR’S RAPE VICTlM SPEAKS the headline ran. The information could not, for legal reasons, be republished in England where a rape victim’s anonymity is protected by the law. But within the gossipy world of show business, and especially among the group of survivors of the class of ’59, within twenty-four hours it was common knowledge that it was Simone Taylor, Cosmetic Executive, who was accusing Terence Blue of rape.