‘What you drinkin thish time, man?’ Lars asked Damian, putting him back to his feet like a dishevelled half-Indian rag doll in designer jeans.

‘No no no, it’s my round,’ said Damian, reaching into the wrong pocket for his wallet, and pulling out his phone instead. ‘Ooooh, look, messssage … oh, fuck! Shit, Lars, what’s the time?’

‘Wasssshamatter, old buddy?’ Lars furrowed his blond brow, putting a heavy hand on Damian’s shoulder.

‘Lars, mate, what’s the time?’ Damian had forgotten he could check the time perfectly well himself on his phone. Not to mention his watch.

Lars looked at his enormous Rolex.

‘It’sh twenty hundred hoursh. But why, my friend?’

‘Because I’ve just been reminded where I’m supposed to be, right now. D’you know a place called L’Ambassadeur?’

‘Do I know L’Ambasshadeur?’ Lars smiled broadly. ‘Man, I have sharesh in that place.’

‘Is it far from here?’

‘I’ll take you there, my friend. Who ya meeting there?’

‘Oh, only my wife. And her boss. And his wife.’

Both men stared at each other for a second, then started roaring with laughter again, slapping backs and thighs in total male harmony.

‘So you see, Poppy, it is vitally important that we don’t feed our kids dairy. Cows’ milk is for kiddy cows. We don’t express our milk and feed it to those kiddy cows, now do we?’ Eleanor, Marty’s wife, gave a nervous laugh and Poppy tried to make her own laughter sound sincere. She had to admit Eleanor had a point (if not a vocabulary that included the word calves), which might, at a pinch, be interesting, but all she had talked about since they’d arrived at L’Ambassadeur had been child-rearing. And not the fun stuff that Poppy’s few friends with children back in the UK talked about – the very sweet things they sometimes said or did, or the anecdotes of embarrassing swearwords coming from little mouths in public. Oh, no.

Eleanor’s party chitchat ran the gamut from children’s nutrition to pre-school education to ‘downtime’. Her only son, Hammond (Why did so many Americans have names that should be surnames?) was 18 months old. Poor little bugger. Poppy didn’t think Eleanor was a bad woman, but she was just so bloody earnest, so desperate not to get things wrong. She had a face that hovered between plain and pretty. Her smile was sweet, her jawline delicate and her pale skin flawless, but her forehead was just too narrow, her eyes just too small, her lips just too thin for her to be a proper beauty. Her light brown shoulder-length hair was side parted, very straight and very shiny. A beautifully cut Narciso Rodriguez beige silk shift dress, a few shades lighter than her hair, skimmed a slender body that bore no visible signs of childbirth. Apparently, she’d been a trader on Wall Street, pre-Hammond. Poppy found this very hard to believe.

Marco, the assistant director, who was short, swarthy and good-looking, with several piercings, was wearing skinny black jeans with a corduroy biker’s jacket and a vintage Alexander McQueen skull-printed scarf around his stubbly throat. His partner, Chase, a model for Ralph Lauren, was dressed entirely in Ralph Lauren and as ludicrously handsome as you’d expect a Ralph Lauren model to be, with a broad jaw, high cheekbones and golden-blond hair swept back from a magnificent brow. He appeared to have about as much personality as the shop dummy he resembled.