Valerie’s face was unreadable, as ever, and her lack of expression – bar a touch of something (amusement?) in her pale blue eyes – made Sylvia feel uneasy, as though there was a whirl of thoughts and judgements going on in the columnist’s head that she, the underling, wasn’t privy to. It made her respond in kind; to anyone else she’d admit she was ecstatic to hear her feature was subbed and approved by Roger and going to be published, but to Valerie she felt forced to adopt a disinterested, almost haughty air.

It was strange, feeling unable to talk with any frankness to Valerie, given she knew so much intimate detail about her life – or, at least, the version of her life she portrayed in her column. She knew Valerie thought she was dying when she started her periods at fourteen because her mother had never spoken about this rite of passage. She knew Valerie had one lover before marrying her husband and stopped herself getting pregnant with him in that pre-pill era by religiously counting days and feigning a headache on the most fertile ones. She knew Valerie had helped a friend leave her violent husband, and that she’d suffered from depression after the birth of her second child. She knew all this, yet she had never really had a conversation with the columnist that went beyond superficial chitchat. But today of all days she needed to know something – and boosted by Valerie’s words about her feature, she felt she could summon the balls to ask.

‘Valerie, can I ask you something?’

‘Of course,’ she said, a smile on her mouth that didn’t reach her eyes.

‘How have you managed it? Being such a successful journalist whilst bringing up two children?’

Valerie drained her glass and looked at her. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I insisted they pay me exceedingly well so I can employ a live-in nanny.’

‘It’s that simple?’

Valerie laughed. ‘Darling, it’s never simple. You know that already, or you wouldn’t have made it to Fleet Street in the first place.’ She leaned forward. ‘You want my advice? Don’t do it. Or at least, don’t do it until you’re a star writer with the freedom to do as you please and a pay packet that gives you considerably more clout than you have now. And believe you me, that’s not as easy as I’ve made it look.’ She paused, cocked her head. ‘Max Harmer started the same time as you, yes?’

Sylvia nodded. ‘Same week.’