The Privileged

by Emily Hourican

Genres: General Fiction; Friendship; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'A Circle of Friends for the 21st century' Irish Times A haunting tale of friendship, loyalty and how one decision, one night, can decide the future. In an exclusive all girls' secondary school, they become friends. They choose the same university, and through smoke-filled nights, lectures, sexual encounters and first loves, their bond deepens: a friendship which seems like it will last for evermore. But then, at an end-of-year party, something happens which changes everything ... Afterwards, they drift apart. Now Stella, a lawyer in New York, lives for her work; Laura, a struggling journalist in Dublin, is still waiting for the scoop to kick-start her career; while Amanda, broken and beautiful, lives a life of slow decay in London. Then the phone call comes which brings them back together, to the friendship they swore would last, and the night when it all went wrong.

Release date: April 7, 2016

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 320

Sample

The edges of the lawn were burnt after weeks of sun and no rain. Yellowish-brown and sticking up in dry tufts, like the horsehair from an old sofa. Lunch was nearly over but they lingered, willing the bell to stay silent, to leave uninterrupted a moment that seemed minutely aware of its own glory. Around them, a steady wall of sound built up. The buzz of flies and bees joined the more distant sounds of birds and the hum of the gym fan, working overtime to cool the few dedicated hockey players who hadn’t seized the obvious excuse of the day, who didn’t realise that a day like that was an excuse for anything. The air between them vibrated with its own steady tone, as the girls sat in a hollow at the centre of it all, a protected place of their own.

‘Every day is going to feel like this once we get out of here and into proper life,’ Amanda said, rolling over and staring straight up at the sky. ‘All glorious, all perfect. All ours.’

‘Our only problem will be how to do them justice,’ Laura agreed solemnly.

‘You’re so conscientious.’ Amanda laughed. ‘Surely sometimes we can have something without deserving it.’

‘I don’t think we can,’ Laura said. ‘I think you have to earn everything good.’

‘You would,’ Amanda said. ‘Stella, what do you think?’

‘I think sometimes you can take what comes, if you want it. Even if you can’t see how it’s meant for you. Even when you’re half-inclined to look around and see who it’s really for.’

‘Well, I think it’s all meant for me,’ said Amanda, shutting her eyes and letting the heat soak through her to the dry grass beneath.

‘You think everything’s meant for you.’ Stella laughed. ‘You’re the most entitled person ever.’

‘The most entitled and the most benighted,’ Amanda sighed. ‘Think of everything I have to do in return for what I get.’

‘What – like turn up on time?’ Laura teased. ‘Put up with everyone thinking you’re wonderful?’

‘All of that and far worse,’ said Amanda. ‘But not for much longer. Once we’re out of here and can start doing what we want.’

Across her, Stella and Laura looked at each other. The future, when Amanda spoke of it, seemed a most delightful place, one they would walk into with her, and be perfectly sure of a welcome. Behind them the ancient chestnut tree at the edge of the lawn stirred in the wind, its branches scraping, like a dry cough.

STELLA’S MOBILE RANG AT THE SAME TIME AS THE white button on the phone in front of her began to flash. Everything was always urgent, a world of people striving, driving hard. She stared at the button, gathering her thoughts for the seven-way conference call.

‘Hello.’ She answered her mobile by instinct, conditioned by the 353 country code to respond. Whoever it was, and only those closest to her had that number, she’d tell them to call back. The white button was still flashing.

‘Stel, it’s Amanda. Something bad.’

Laura, God bless her, so sweet and hesitant about herself, got straight to the point where everyone else was concerned. Her years of training as a journalist meant that she didn’t waste time on the unimportant.

‘What now?’ Stella tried, failed, to keep the weary note from her voice that made her sound so much older than twenty-eight. With Amanda, it was always something. Usually something big, dramatic. Noisy. Sometimes she felt as if she and Laura had been picking up the pieces for years. For ever. When had she and Laura last talked for any length without Amanda hijacking the focus of their conversation? As if, even now, thirteen years on, they were still in the shadow of her considerable glamour?

And if Amanda was with them, it was always all about her. A room with Amanda in it felt like a room with a vortex into which everything, eventually, would fall. Still, it must be pretty bad or Laura wouldn’t ring so early. Stella checked her diamond-studded Tag Heuer, a gift from Sean – barely eight a.m.

‘There’s a story in one of the papers. No names. It’s one of those “guess which former society beauty has been spotted” but it’s obviously her. Apparently she and Huw have locked themselves into the house in Knightsbridge. Boarded up the front door and shut off all the downstairs rooms. They’re living on the top floor. No one is allowed in except that rat Jake. I don’t think anyone else much tries any more. Someone went to Huw’s family to get help, and then leaked it to the papers. They aren’t eating or sleeping or talking to anyone. The place is filthy – they’re filthy too. Seems it’s been going on for months. It’s really bad this time.’

Amanda filthy? Amanda, with her effortlessly shiny hair, golden skin and natural elegance, with her faint aloofness, sharp wit and deep laugh. Amanda O’Hagen, social queen from the age of thirteen, locked into the wedding-cake-white four-storey Knightsbridge house, where she and Huw had lived in the five years since they’d got married, seeing no one? Stella had been to the house just once, right before the wedding. It had been an interior designer’s dream, the kind of thing that got full-colour photographs in glossy magazines for the rest of the world to drool over, with its impeccable grey interior walls, original stuccoed ceilings, and fireplaces big enough to stand in. There was a Picasso sketch or two, a Bacon in the dining room, a small Turner onto which the light from the first-floor windows fell at evening, making it glow with a golden fire all its own. Amanda had told Stella how much she loved that painting, joking that she would have married Huw for it, even if he hadn’t been the handsomest man on earth. What must the house look like now? Stella wondered. How filthy was filthy? And why was it anything, now, to do with her?

‘So what’s different?’ Again, that weary note.

‘They packed Dora off a few months ago, back to Mrs O’Hagen.’

‘Right.’ Stella, lawyer now before friend, considered the implications. ‘And if Amanda is sending Dora back to her mother, that can’t be good.’

‘Not good at all, I’d say, when you think how long she spent keeping the two of them apart. Apparently Dora thinks she’s on holiday. She’s due to go home in a couple of weeks, but Mrs O’Hagen’s been talking about trying to get her into St Assumpta’s, so she can keep an eye on her.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Laura. Isn’t that where this whole mess started? Mrs O’Hagen and St Assumpta’s?’ Stella found she was shaking, her breath coming unevenly.

‘If they must go giving boys blow jobs, at least this way we know they’re St Augustin’s boys …’ Laura drawled.

It had been their catchphrase for years, ever since Amanda had heard her mother say it to her father, while Amanda was getting ready to go to Dargle’s, the rugby-club disco, where all the boys and girls from smart Southside schools went on a Friday night. Amanda had been fourteen. Now, it no longer seemed funny, even though the three of them had screamed with laughter over it for years. It had been the one thing guaranteed to break the ice between them when they met up after a separation, with increasingly little in common.

‘Laura, I’d better go. I’ll call you back, right?’ The little white light was still flashing. Her assistant had put her head round the door twice already, looking slightly panicked the second time. Stella reached out to push the button that would bring up a huge digital split-screen showing the seven participants in the conference call. Two were down the corridor, in their own twenty-seventh-floor offices, but the rest were in Tokyo, including Sean. Beautiful Sean, with his strawberry blond hair, his white-white teeth and the one drop of west-of-Ireland blood from which he had forged a complete identity. A man in the mould of John F. Kennedy, Stella thought, now seven thousand miles away from her. Also seven thousand miles away from his two perfect children and blonde WASP wife.

The white light was still flashing. They were all waiting for Stella, who had – as always – every possible fact relating to the case neatly categorised in her mind. She had read the depositions and documents with such meticulous attention that even the Japanese clients were impressed. She had a talent for hard work and fact-retention, which meant she was being fast-tracked through one of New York’s oldest, most established legal firms. Push the button, Stella, she thought. Deal with Amanda later. But she hesitated. Mrs O’Hagen and St Assumpta’s. Where it had all started. Amanda, at fourteen, the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen.

She remembered their first meeting, the first time she’d gone to Dargle’s. Her parents had finally relented, after a year of Stella’s begging: ‘Please! Everyone else is allowed go.’ That wasn’t strictly true. There was a fairly even split between girls like Amanda O’Hagen, who were not only allowed to go but handed wads of cash to buy themselves a new dress, get a spray tan and their hair done, and girls like Stella, whose parents felt they were still too young for nightclubs. They probably believed the media reports about underage binge drinking and blow jobs in the bushes.

‘You’re too young,’ her parents had said, time after time. ‘If you’re going to Dargle’s at thirteen, God knows what you’ll be up to by fifteen. All-night raves and acid parties.’ They had relented when she was fourteen, dropping her and Laura a couple of streets from the club.

‘We’ll walk from here,’ Stella had offered, not wanting to be seen getting out of her mum’s old silver banger. Laura was an unusual bright orange colour, her face caked in tan foundation. She was normally pale, with pink cheeks, and fine blonde hair in a short pageboy, the fringe clipped neatly to one side. She had that kind of hair – neat, biddable – which stayed in clips, not like Stella’s unruly mop of dark curls. She was wearing a very short flouncy flesh-coloured skirt over bare legs, an off-the-shoulder T-shirt that said ‘Pussy Posse’ in sequins, and shoes so high she couldn’t walk.

Stella hadn’t deviated much from her usual dress code – skinny jeans, a white tank top, a grey Chloé jacket her mother had given her when it became obvious she was never going to get into it again, and Converse. But she was woefully underdressed for the event. All around her, girls in micro-minis, with tight strappy tops and hooker heels, backcombed hair and fake lashes, were converging on the door at Dargle’s. Despite the cold April evening, no one else wore a coat or even jacket. The sky was an orange glow, their breath coming in misty puffs as the girls faked nonchalance. There was a studied coolness in the way they slouched, but they betrayed their nerves in odd fidgety movements – the hand that didn’t know where to go running through perfectly straightened hair, the sudden, high-pitched laugh, all of the tell-tale signs that said they were fourteen, not twenty-four.

‘What if they don’t let us in?’ Laura muttered, clinging to Stella’s arm for balance. Her teeth were chattering with nerves and Stella could feel her arm shaking slightly as it gripped harder.

‘It’ll be fine,’ she said, looking up the line to where two burly doormen were looking through girls’ bags, asking what school they were from, and leering at each other over their heads.

‘Look,’ Laura nudged her, ‘there’s Amanda O’Hagen.’ In that crew of giggling, sniggering, nervy teenagers, Amanda stood out like a fully grown movie star. Her honey blonde hair framed her perfect face, with the slanting cobalt-blue eyes, and rippled down her back. Her teeny-tiny dress was white broderie anglaise, tight and low-cut, exposing the tops of her breasts and stopping barely short of her bum, but saved itself from looking slutty by the almost girlish prettiness of the fabric. It was the couture version of the hooker outfits surrounding them. Her high silver-coloured platform shoes were tied at the ankles. She neither fidgeted nor giggled.

With her was a gaggle of the girls who attended her at school, at the shopping centre, the park, anyplace Stella had ever seen her. They were clearly content to exist in Amanda’s shadow, to be the foil and setting she required. They didn’t, Stella noticed, bother her with too much of their chatter, addressing only the odd remark, to which she seemed to respond with a gracious inclination of the head and that small upward curve of the lips that could have been a smile or simply acknowledgement. The doormen behaved towards her as if she was indeed the superstar she seemed. No vulgar jokes. They treated her with, Stella thought, respect.

The evening was a mess of music she didn’t like – too many chant-along choruses and guys punching the air. These weren’t the girls Stella knew from school – bitchy, confrontational, some matronly, some indifferent. Suddenly, they were all the same, writhing and contorting themselves into supplicating shapes, always with one eye on the boys. When they danced, it was as if all they were missing was a pole. They slid up and down against each other, tossing their hair and licking their lips. Or bent forward at the waist with straight legs, bums stuck out, then up, chests thrust forward, hips gyrating. But everything was punctuated with the same disarming, supplicating giggles and dissembling shrugs, a rush to show irony rather than intent. Condensation ran down the blacked-out windows and walls, and a faint smell of bleach and sweat hung around them.

Girls staggered into the loos in pairs, tiny bottles of something strong and sticky hidden in their cleavages or in the lining of bags, then out again, laughing all the louder. Stella could see Laura chatting to a couple of the girls in their year, but their eyes flicked over her to the side room where cans of Coke and 7Up were on sale, and a large group of lads had converged to push each other and swagger. Stella went outside.

The stands, orange in the street lights, with their own faint hum of glories gone, were empty, except for a few huddled couples and a group of boys smoking and passing a bottle covertly around. Beyond the walls, Stella could hear the steady roar of traffic, proof that in the real world it was still just half past nine on a regular Saturday night. The playing pitch looked black, disappearing into shadow halfway across, with the opposite seating entirely obscured. Stella headed in that direction, thinking she might understand it better from an outsider’s perspective, looking in, not at. She moved softly, her Converse making no sound on the wet grass. A sudden slight movement took her by surprise. To her left, in the front row of the darkest side of the stadium, an inky shadow separated slowly into three distinct ones. More boys, she thought, and was about to slip away, certain they hadn’t seen her, when she heard a moan. It was a girl. She stayed motionless, waiting for her eyes to make some sense of the tableau before her.

The girl’s white dress caught her attention first, then the gleam of a pale shoe, tied on at the ankle. It was Amanda, but Amanda with her head flopped forward, slumped in the stadium seat. A boy was seated on either side of her. One was smoking, head thrown back in the attitude of a docker taking respite after a long day. The other, Stella was pretty sure, had his hand up Amanda’s skirt.

She started to move noiselessly backwards but another faint moan stopped her. The boy with his hand up Amanda’s skirt now had the other in his trousers, while the one with the cigarette was tugging at her dress to expose more of her breasts. None of it looked right to Stella, who prided herself on Not Walking Away – indeed, she was always recounting the virtues of getting involved. Years later, looking back, she knew that a faint silvery path, alternative to the one she thought she was treading, had branched out beside her that night, and that her feet had shifted towards it.

‘Amanda!’ she called. ‘Amanda? Your dad’s here.’

Silence.

‘Amanda!’ Feigning annoyance now. ‘Amanda, come on! He’s asking for you.’ She moved forward, turning her head from left to right as if she was scanning the stands. By now the boys were getting up, gathering cigarettes and a bottle. Seeing Stella, they muttered at her and slouched off, hoods up and heads turned away so that she couldn’t see who they were. Amanda remained where she was.

Stella grasped Amanda’s shoulders and sat her upright. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth slack. Was she drunk, or stoned, or what? And what was Stella going to do with her now? ‘Amanda, can you hear me?’

A low response, incomprehensible.

Get Laura, she decided. But what about Amanda? Might the boys just come back if they saw her alone? She felt a wave of protectiveness for a girl who, until now, she had only ever seen in control of every situation. Amanda was smart as well as beautiful. She shone at school, on the debating team and at hockey. ‘Stay there,’ Stella murmured. ‘I’ll get help.’

Laura was outside, talking to a thin boy with droll blue eyes and a cow’s lick. She came immediately when Stella interrupted them. On the way back across the pitch, she filled Laura in on what had happened. Amanda was exactly where Stella had left her, except that her eyes were now fully closed and her head lay at an angle against her shoulder.

‘What’s up with her? Why won’t she wake up?’ Laura asked.

‘I don’t know. She can’t just be pissed. Or not that pissed. Maybe she’s on something. Whatever, we have to get her out of here, and not back through the club.’

‘Why us? Why not get Sally or Nadine? They’re her friends.’ Laura sounded petulant.

It was a fair question, which Stella couldn’t really answer. But letting St Assumpta’s two most notorious gossips in on the action, then watching them drag Amanda through the crowds of curious teenagers, who would all stop dancing to stare at her, felt wrong. ‘Would you want Sally or Nadine looking after you if you were in that state?’ She gestured towards Amanda.

‘No, but they’re not my friends.’

Stella knew that Laura wasn’t going to fight her. ‘Is there any other way out of here?’

‘There’s a side gate beside where I was talking to that boy, but it’s locked.’

‘Can you find a bouncer and get him to open it? Tell him a bit of what’s happened. I bet you anything they don’t want anyone seeing Amanda like this either.’

‘Okay, but what then? Where do we take her?’

‘Your house?’

Laura’s mother, Nessa, was often out in the evenings. She had once been muse to the country’s most celebrated portrait painter, a man who had believed himself to be Laura’s father. He had discovered his error and Nessa’s silent duplicity only when Laura was nine and her mother, in a drunken rage, had spat it at him one night during a row about money, whereupon he had walked out of Nessa’s life and, by extension, Laura’s. At nine, she had felt too old to forge a relationship with the man who turned out to be biologically connected to her, and too young to insist on staying close to the man she knew as her father. That left her with no father, and often no mother. Nessa had readily made her peace with the idea of leaving Laura alone for long periods. It was either that or let life float past her, taking all the dreams she had had as a young girl in the dreary midlands town of her birth. And, indeed, once Laura had grown too old to be taken to parties and dumped on beds with the coats, all she required was to be left alone with her books and her homework.

‘Okay, mine. Nessa’s certainly not going to be home tonight. Richard Long is in town. She was pouring half a bottle of Shalimar over herself as I was leaving.’ Laura always called her mother ‘Nessa’. It was one of the many signs of the sisterly level on which they operated: friendly, not hierarchical. ‘God. Imagine Amanda O’Hagen in my house.’ She laughed.

Once the doormen had grasped the situation, they were more than happy to open the side gate discreetly and let the three girls out onto the road. ‘She’ll be fine,’ one of them said to Laura. ‘Let her sleep. She’ll be grand in the morning. Won’t remember much of this.’ He exchanged a furtive look with his companion.

They got a taxi, even though Laura’s house wasn’t far, because they couldn’t drag Amanda through the leafy streets of middle-suburban Dublin. They made her pay for it. Stella searched her wallet, finding wads of cash, then took out her mobile phone. Amanda, of course, was one of the few girls in school to have one. ‘Let’s hope she calls her mother “Mum”,’ she said, with a look at Laura. ‘If they’re on first-name terms, I’m never going to work this out.’ She scrolled down, relieved to find ‘Mum’ between Moneypenny’s Salon and Muttley’s Pet Grooming. ‘“Staying at Nadines, back tomorrow,”’ she typed. ‘Let’s hope she really is as independent as she seems.’

Amanda’s phone beeped. ‘Mum’ flashed up. ‘K. Don’t forget lunch w Alice @ 2’.

‘Golly. Amanda’s mother is fast.’ Laura fell into fits of laughter. So did Stella. After the tension of the last hour, anything would have seemed funny. ‘Should we text Nadine and say Amanda’s gone home?’

‘Nah, forget it. I bet Amanda wouldn’t bother.’

Laura’s house was a red-brick mid-terrace Victorian from the outside, Moorish and exotic inside. Polished floorboards strewn with rugs in deep reds and purples; huge, highly polished copper vases, ornate candelabra and low-hanging, dim lights. Nessa had made deliberate efforts to keep modern life from intruding. There was no electric kettle or toaster: water was boiled in a copper saucepan and toast made on the Aga. In the bathroom, the antique, claw-footed bath was rarely filled because the water-heating system was old and wonky.

A jumble of paintings and sketches, probably as valuable as the house, hung on the walls. Some were by the man who had believed himself to be Laura’s father and who had marked her birthdays with a picture of her – Laura at three, solemn-eyed and direct; Laura at five, a new wistfulness upon her; Laura, eight now, and chubby, but still with that open, appealing gaze. Others were by contemporaries, less lauded than he, but ready to toss off a sketch as thanks for a meal or an impromptu party. Yet others were by Nessa herself, largely from the days before Laura, when she had been the celebrated portrait painter’s student and before she had had the misfortune to become his muse and mistress – landscapes, still-lifes, a tiny self-portrait, with a beguiling energy and lightness of touch.

‘What now?’ Stella demanded. They had hauled Amanda out of the taxi, up the steps and through the door.

‘Can we just put her upstairs? Enough already!’

‘Fine. That bouncer said she’d sleep it off. I suppose she will. Your room?’

‘Okay. You and I will have to share the other bed.’ Laura’s room had two tiny wooden truckle beds with surprisingly comfortable mattresses. Tucked into one of them, still wearing her white dress, hair spread across the pillow, Amanda looked about ten years old. She was by now deeply asleep, snoring faintly. Downstairs, they could hear her phone beeping manically. Probably Nadine and Sally trying to find out what exciting things she had got up to.

Stella and Laura left her, and made hot chocolate in the kitchen. In Laura’s house, this meant grating cooking chocolate into two hand-made mugs, then adding maple syrup to sweeten it. Nessa, when she was with them, added a dash of rum to hers. They chatted about what they would say to Amanda in the morning, and speculated on what had happened to her. ‘Even if she knows, I bet she won’t tell us,’ had been Laura’s verdict, shortly before they went to bed. There was no sign of Nessa, though it was long after two.

Before she settled down to sleep, Stella banged her head on the pillow eight times. It was her system for waking up – eight bangs, eight o’clock. It never failed her. She wanted to be awake by the time Amanda opened her eyes. The strange feeling of protectiveness that had caught her earlier had stayed with her. She didn’t want Amanda feeling disoriented and frightened at the strange surroundings.

But when she opened her eyes, light was streaming into the bedroom, and Amanda was sitting up in the small wooden bed, staring straight at her. Her cobalt eyes were undimmed by any shade of fear or awkwardness. ‘Your house or Laura’s?’ she said, sounding faintly amused, her brief, blue gaze like flashes of sky between trees seen from a fast-moving car.

‘Laura’s.’ After all that, it was Stella who felt awkward, wondering if they had overreacted the night before. Behaved in a foolish, uncool way. Such was Amanda’s self-possession, she felt an explanation was instantly needed. ‘We didn’t know what else to do. You were so … I don’t know. So …’

‘Drunk?’

‘Actually, I’m not sure. You were … out cold. And there were these boys. In the stands …We thought the best thing was just to get you out of there, without making a big fuss. Put you to bed and let you go to sleep. You seemed like you were asleep already in Dargle’s.’

There was a long pause. Amanda stared at her, consideringly. ‘Boys?’ she finally said.

Stuck in the beam of her gaze, Stella felt she now knew how a rabbit must feel as it tried to summon the willpower to bolt. ‘Yes, two of them. They were, well, they were—’

‘I’m sure you did the right thing,’ Amanda cut across her. Neither then nor at any other time did she ask what exactly had happened that night. Something that surprised Stella every time she thought about it. ‘What about Nadine and Sally?’

‘We didn’t tell them anything.’ Laura was awake now, sitting up beside Stella, sounding proud. ‘We just bundled you into a taxi and brought you here. We made you pay for the taxi,’ she added.

Amanda’s top lip twitched. Even after a night of mysterious debauchery, with make-up smeared under her eyes and a rumpled dress, she looked bewitching. A little younger, a little more reachable than the Amanda they were used to, but still beautiful.

‘I suppose I’d better go. Even my parents might be concerned by now.’ She spoke with such precision that Stella found herself wondering if she had had elocution lessons.

‘Oh, we texted your mum. From your phone. To say you were staying at Nadine’s. Your mum said be back for something at two o’clock with someone called Alice.’ Laura’s words tumbled over each other.

‘Let’s just hope Nadine had the sense not to go back to mine,’ said Amanda, with a laugh. ‘She was supposed to stay over.’

Stella was appalled, but Amanda laughed again, a real laugh, not the fake ‘get lost’ sound that Stella heard her make at school. ‘She’ll have worked something out. Shall we have breakfast?’



Nessa was in the kitchen, wearing a heavy black silk kimono with pairs of white dancing cranes hand-painted onto it. ‘Poached or scrambled?’ She waved at a box of eggs. ‘Richard stayed the night so, for goodness’ sake, don’t go bursting into the bathroom. The lack of locks makes him nervous. I’m sure embassy life doesn’t usually involve teenagers surprising one at one’s ablutions. Not likely to be his sort of thing at all, even with teens as pretty as you.’ This was addressed to Amanda, now wearing a pair of Laura’s jeans and an old football shirt.

‘Scrambled, please. And I’ll knock first. Can I help with the eggs?’

Amanda made toast instead, at Nessa’s request, spreading it with plenty of butter, eating it and the eggs when they came. Stella had expected her to pick at her food and talk about diets. Amanda even offered to wash up, and was charming to Richard when he came down, looking so buttoned-up and prim that Stella wondered what on earth Laura’s scatty mother saw in him (‘It’s the opposites thing,’ Amanda said later, knowingly).

‘Come with me,’ she’d suggested to Stella and Laura, when she was getting ready to leave. ‘Come and meet Alice. It’ll be a real treat.’ Her voice held a faint hint of laughter.

Nessa had no objection, and Stella’s parents wouldn’t expect her back for hours, so Stella and Laura said yes. In the taxi (Amanda, they learned, always took taxis: ‘Never wait for a lift, never depend on anyone for your freedom of movement,’ was one of her maxims), she said to Laura, ‘Your mother paints very well.’

‘How did you know which ones were hers?’ Laura asked. Nessa’s pictures were mostly unsigned, or with a signature so scrawling as to be illegible.

‘They look like her. A bit wild and unconventional on the surface, but with a disciplined core.’ Both girls stared at her in amazement. How on earth did she come out with such things? Especially, Stella thought, since it was so very true of Nessa, whom she had known from childhood in all her many moods, and whose wispy dark hair, forever escaping its pins and tumbling down her back, and swirling silk skirts hid a personality that could be steely and implacable when it came to the things she considered important – art, food, love, and the development of Laura’s personality.

‘She doesn’t really paint now,’ Laura replied. ‘Hasn’t for years. But she was good. I wish she’d do more.’

‘She’s probably scared. She seems highly perfectionist.’

Again, they were astonished at her perception.

‘How could you tell?’ asked Laura