Although it’s a tense operation, and my old anxieties are still there, fluttering like moths around a flame, I sense myself relaxing a little as the models come and go, striding past me with wide smiles and breezy confidence. There is one wobbly moment when Sammia teeters on her platform boots, but she rights herself, and there’s an audible gasp of relief. Ludo giggles and kicks at his chair legs, and I catch Chrissie shushing him. No, Ludo, she mouths. Be quiet.

Ludo hearing the word no? This must be a first. I turn to Nick, who’s sitting beside me – he knows all about my neighbours – and he smiles almost imperceptibly.

Back and forth, the women stride, in a dazzling array of colours. And then we are nearing the end, and the music cranks up as the last model appears, the indubitable star of the show: Penny, with her blonde hair bouncing in tumbling waves and her lips painted glossy red, as she sashays out in elegant black trousers and strappy espadrilles, topped off with the most fabulous piece of all.

There is applause, and everyone is standing now and cheering, as Penny beams with delight, twirling in her Pippa poncho, before taking a bow.

1 a.m., all back to mine

We have drunk Penny’s champagne, Nick, Penny, Spencer and me. Others came back too – Chrissie (minus the baby), and Isla, Shelley and Jules – but now it’s just the four of us, celebrating. Izzy and Maeve are asleep upstairs – or, at least, they’re supposed to be. More champagne was fetched from the shop down the road, and G&Ts mixed for Penny. And after a fair few, and her thanking me so much I’ve had to deftly change the subject, I have started to understand why Penny does this ‘brush-off’ thing, this trying to distance herself from her own son, as if her own life is far too busy to accommodate him comfortably.

Because she misses him dreadfully, I have come to realise. But she can’t bring herself to admit it. She goes so far as to imply that he’s a nuisance – perpetually checking for dust – when in truth her heart is breaking at the thought of him going back to New Zealand. She tries to coax him to stay by running his baths and fussing over him, getting in his favourite foods as if he’s a little boy. She even managed to track down butterscotch Angel Delight. But he has to go back, he explained, when she became a little gin-teary earlier. He has a film to make about a run of Christmas shows in Auckland; people are waiting for him. He can’t simply not go.

‘It’s because of Canada really,’ he murmurs later, when the two of us find ourselves alone in the kitchen. ‘Remember I told you my dad took me there?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But why—’