Finally, her husband looked up and pushed his pale brown hair back from his forehead. ‘Why don’t you invite Conor and Sharon over this way for a few days? Our treat. Conor can have a spot of R&R, and you can ask him to back off a little. But do tread gently.’

‘Miles,’ said Tess, rising to kiss his head, ‘you’re a superstar.’

Tess had never forgotten the advice she’d received from Marjorie in the employment agency. ‘Calm down,’ she’d said, ‘and then come back to me.’ Tess had been eighteen. When she was thirty-six, she’d calmed down. By then she was millions of pounds away from needing a secretarial job.

She’d ricocheted through her twenties and early thirties. She’d been in every magazine and on every catwalk She’d been to all the right parties and a lot of the wrong ones. She’d had all the sex and all the success, and she didn’t regret a single minute. Well, okay, she did have a sprinkling of regrets. But she’d avoided so much tedium. She’d managed to skip the phase where people went to dinner parties and talked about tiling. She’d never been part of a conversation about clamping or school admission policies. She’d never visited a DIY store or a clothing outlet (even the name was horrific). Nowadays, she looked at young models and saw how the most successful girls treated it as a business. For her, it had been a lifestyle. And, for the most part, it had been wonderful.

And then she’d got tired. Caution had set in. That and self-preservation. Oh, and she’d met Miles.

After her first decade as a model, Tess had realised that to become internationally famous is to become fenced off. The only people who gain access to your enclosure tend to be equally well known. Or extremely wealthy. Miles Whittingdale fell into the latter category. Banker father, stay-at-home mother, lesser-known public school followed by Cambridge, career in hedge-fund management, one sister a barrister, the other a hospital consultant: there was little in Miles’s life that suggested common ground with Tess. Although he protested that his family wasn’t upper class (‘We’re more upper middle’), they were close enough to make Tess wary. Despite her gilded career, the English ruling class put her on edge. When faced by one of their number, she either ramped up her Irishness to Agnes Brown levels or became scared to open her mouth for fear every last vowel and consonant sounded wrong. She might have left Kilmitten, but she’d carried her accent around the globe. For her, it was ‘nooze’, not ‘news’, ‘fabalas’ rather than ‘fabulous’, and Prince ‘Willum’ was second in line to the throne.