She gave a tight smile. ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine. A bit weary today, that’s all.’

When she’d left the room, her footsteps heavy in the hall, Conor turned to his father.

‘Ginny’s a little off-key,’ explained his dad. ‘Like she said, though, there’s nothing for you to get worked up about.’

She didn’t look a little off-key. She looked rigid with misery. Conor was wary of asking questions. That wasn’t what they did. His concern won out. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Oh, you know …’

‘Jesus, Dad, if I knew, I wouldn’t be asking. It’s not the baby, is it?’

His father screwed his eyes shut, the wrinkles fanning out across his face. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s Tess.’

Chapter 17

Tess leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes and waited to be transformed. The studio smelt of lilies and coffee. On the stereo, Michael Stipe sang about ‘Shiny Happy People’. As much as she loved REM, she would have preferred something more low-key. Something quieter. She’d got trashed the night before and every millimetre of her body was in revolt.

She shouldn’t have gone out, not on the eve of a magazine shoot. According to Estelle, one of the big cosmetics companies was showing an interest in her. A cosmetics contract would take her career to another level, so a job like this, where the emphasis was on next season’s trends in eyeshadow and Tess’s face, was important. She’d been moping around the flat when her friend Zoë had called. ‘Just one drink,’ Tess had said, meaning at most two or three. Seven hours later, they’d swayed out of a Mayfair club. Next she knew, the alarm was wailing, and she was behind time, and … Oh, dear Lord, her head.

‘A late one, was it?’ asked Belinda, the make-up artist, as she dabbed on concealer.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Moisturiser is your friend, lovey,’ replied Belinda, whose own face gleamed like she’d bathed in Castrol GTX. ‘If you’re going to go clubbing before a day’s work, at least remember to take off your slap and put on some moisturiser. Your skin’s like sandpaper.’

‘Thanks,’ said Tess, ‘consider me told.’ She reached for her coffee. It tasted like tar. ‘Proper coffee’, people called it. Give her an improper coffee any day of the week: a nice milky Nescafé with two spoons of sugar, the sort her mother made.

She was trying not to think about her mother. After Ginny had revealed that Tess’s father was dead, she’d been reluctant to say much more. ‘He wasn’t from around here,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t know him that well.’ What he’d been called and where he’d been from didn’t matter, she maintained. ‘He can’t meet you, you can’t meet him, so his name is irrelevant.’