Eventually, Tess spoke. ‘I almost forgot. I brought you a present.’ She bent down and picked up the black box. Earlier, her choice had felt inspired. She was less confident now. Nina might not get the reference. She might find the gesture condescending.

Carefully, Nina removed the red ribbon and lifted the lid. The box was crammed with lipsticks, eyeshadows, contour kits, moisturisers, exfoliants, eye creams and every imaginable unguent.

Tess swallowed. ‘Happy birthday. My way of saying … Actually, I’m not sure what I’m saying. For some reason, I was thinking about—’

‘London,’ said Nina, picking out a nail polish and passing it from hand to hand. ‘Shepherd’s Bush, 1987. You and your bag of make-up.’

‘I’m getting sentimental in my old age. I’ll have to stop going to funerals.’

Nina returned the nail polish to the box. As she did, her face contorted and her sobs returned. Great heaves of unhappiness passed through her thin body. ‘I’m sorry,’ she kept saying.

‘Stop it. Stop being sorry.’ Tess removed a wad of tissues from the box on the counter, but they no longer seemed adequate. She had a quick look around and her eyes alighted on a clean tea towel, which she thrust in Nina’s direction. Then she walked around to the other side of the table and kissed her friend’s head. ‘What are we like?’ she said.

Presently Nina’s tears eased. The tremors continued, though, and when she tried to eat, the fork clanged against the side of the bowl. She drank the last of her champagne. ‘I don’t have any more of this, I’m afraid, but there’s a bottle of wine in the fridge.’

‘That’ll do nicely,’ said Tess. ‘I’ll get it.’

She filled two glasses. Despite everything, she thought, there was still a distance between them. Like most people, she had romantic ideas about friendship. She believed that real friends would always find each other again. But normal friendships had an ebb and flow, not a twenty-five-year hiatus.

‘This mightn’t be the best night to raise this,’ she said, ‘and I know it was a long time ago, but you must have had questions about the way I reacted to your break-up with Tom.’

‘I expected you to be annoyed,’ said Nina. ‘And, then, after the piece in the paper about Flan … well, I thought you might bawl me out of it. I wouldn’t have blamed you for getting angry. I was angry myself. But, straight up, I didn’t expect years of silence.’ She gave a resigned shrug. ‘At some point along the way, I accepted that we’d grown apart. It happens. After all, what did we have in common? I was a teacher with two small kids, changing manky nappies and watching Teletubbies. You were in New York, partying with movie stars. It would have been strange if we’d remained close.’