At the start, she found the countryside strange. Compared to the soft contours of home, it felt so angular, so efficient. She’d grown up surrounded by cattle and sheep. Here there wasn’t an animal to be seen. Crops – wheat, barley, sugar beet and cabbages – formed the landscape. The hall itself was magnificent. A listed Georgian building in honey-coloured stone, it had ten bedrooms, six acres of garden, a stable block and a swimming pool. It even had its own lake with a resident kingfisher. When Daisy came along, an unexpectedly placid and self-contained little girl, Tess devoted herself to full-time motherhood with an energy she’d once reserved for three-day parties. She’d always been scared of children. She worried that she was too flighty, too selfish. Gradually, her concerns burned away. Willowthorpe became her cocoon, ‘Don’t look back’ her mantra.

None of this meant her new life was perfect. Miles spent a large part of the week in London, and while Tess had made some local friends, she feared they held her at arm’s length. There were days when she couldn’t stop nostalgia washing over her. She missed her old lifestyle. She missed the hush when she walked into a room; the hubbub of the shows; the exhilaration of being able to go wherever she wanted whenever she wanted. Most of all, she missed her old self. For much of her life she’d had no internal editor. She definitely hadn’t been fearless. She’d worried – pointlessly it had turned out – about a million things. Nevertheless, she’d always come on out and said what she’d thought. But what was charming at seventeen could sound nasty at thirty-seven. At forty-seven it would come across as unhinged or, worse, bitter. Tess struggled with this.

Anniversaries became more important to her. The thirtieth anniversary of meeting Estelle outside Wonder Burger was approaching, as were the twenty-fifth anniversaries of her first Vogue cover and big advertising contract.

A couple of weeks back, she’d been musing about all of this with Miles. She’d been part of so many different worlds, she’d said, thinking about them made her dizzy.

‘But you’re happy here?’ he asked, concern in his voice.

‘I am.’

‘Did it ever occur to you that Willowthorpe is an English version of Kilmitten?’

‘It did,’ said Tess, ‘and the scary part is I like it.’

Afterwards, she sifted through her thoughts.