Tracy checked on Courtney. The kid was fast asleep, snoring gently. A piglet, a kitten.

There was no Beck’s left – how did that happen? So Tracy made do with half a bottle of Chardonnay she found in the fridge, left over from who knew when. The wine looked like urine and didn’t taste much better. She could feel it roiling like acid in her stomach. Found half a packet of crisps hiding at the back of the cupboard and munched her way through them without tasting them.

When she turned on the TV the end credits for Collier were just scrolling.

Dropped off in front of the telly. She had been watching Britain’s Got Talent and then she must have fallen asleep because the next thing Tilly knew she’d woken herself up with her own snoring. Pnorr, pnorrr, pnorrrgh! She jerked awake, felt her heart trip. These little evening snoozes were going to be the death of her.

She was confused. What was on the box now seemed real, not television at all. There was Saskia aiming a gun at someone and shouting, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ but she could hear Saskia moving about upstairs in the bathroom, the sound of running water. She was forever saying how dirty the cottage was and did Tilly actually know how to clean. ‘Filth everywhere,’ she said. For some reason Tilly imagined filth as a person, a man in an old-fashioned brown mackintosh, greasy and stained – a trilby shading his face. He lurked around a corner, waiting to jump out and flash her. Tilly had encountered a few like that in Soho in the old days, hanging round the back of the mucky bookshops and the strip joints. She had been propositioned a couple of times too. Tilly hadn’t been tempted, even when she was hungry for a crust. She knew for a fact that Phoebe, Dame Phoebe, had gone off for a weekend on a yacht with some rich nabob. The man looked like a frog. She came back with diamonds. Draw your own conclusions.

Yesterday Saskia had silently presented Tilly with a mat of soapy hair from the bath plughole. Enough to make a wig from. She was holding the hair on a piece of loo roll as if it was a dangerous spider about to attack her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘maybe you could, um, clear up after yourself ?’

It was just a bit of hair, for heaven’s sake. People were funny about things like that. Phoebe couldn’t abide toenails, her own or other people’s. That woman went for a pedicure every single month, never cut her own toenails, not once! ‘Nanny used to do it for me,’ she said, when they were first living in Soho.

Tilly took the hair reluctantly from Saskia. ‘Oh dear, I appear to be moulting,’ she said, trying to muster some dignity.

And then suddenly Tilly was looking at herself, as if the television were a mirror. A cruel, distorting mirror. She looked terrible. Overweight, mad. That awful Brillo wig. Of course, she was watching Collier, she realized that. She hadn’t entirely lost her marbles. Yet.

On screen, she was pottering around a kitchen, putting a roast dinner in front of Vince Collier, telling him he didn’t eat properly, that he needed to settle down with a nice girl. Tilly had never made a roast dinner in her life. ‘Don’t nag, Mum,’ Vince said. ‘You know you’re the only woman for me.’

To be honest, she didn’t look well. Intimations of mortality. Time’s wingèd chariot and all that. She wasn’t ready to die yet. She imagined Phoebe giving the oration at her funeral, talking about her ‘dear friend’, everyone sad for five minutes. She would be a footnote for a few years and then nothing. An unsatisfactory afterlife on Alibi and ITV3. Mind you, she had, apparently, already joined the ranks of the might-be-deads. There was a woman on set the other day, Tilly had no idea who she was, a journalist probably – middle-aged, the gushy sort, wide-eyed and faux-innocent. When she was introduced to Tilly she said, ‘Gosh, I thought you were dead!’ Just like that. How rude.

‘Don’t worry, Till,’ Julia said. ‘I put a nasty curse on her. She’ll be dead long before you.’

Julia was nice, like a normal person. More or less. Knew how to have a conversation, didn’t just talk at you, like everyone else seemed to do. And Julia always had something interesting to say, which is more than you could say for poor Saskia who, when it came right down to it, was only interested in herself. Her photo had been in the Mail last week, awful rag, on the arm of a man – some rugby player – coming out of a restaurant. ‘Collier star Saskia Bligh.’ Showed it to everyone. Twittering on about it. Twitter! Her phone was never out of her hand. She twittered, she said, ‘Do you?’ Showed Tilly on her phone. A technological step too far. Tilly didn’t even know how to turn a computer on, wrong generation, of course. Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing – getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?

‘Tweets,’ Saskia said. Well exactly. Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. People couldn’t cope with empty space any more, they had to fill it up with anything that came to hand. There was a time when people kept their thoughts to themselves. Tilly liked that time. They had a blue budgerigar when she was small. Tweety-pie. It was hard to be fond of a budgerigar. Her father accidentally stood on it. Her mother said she didn’t see how you could stand on a budgerigar. Too late now to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Tilly wanted to bury it but Father put it on the fire. A pyre. She could still see its little body, the feathers flaring. She hadn’t particularly liked the bird but she had felt sorry for it and gave some time over to crying for it. Shame. Tilly didn’t want to be cremated. Thrown on the fire. She should write that down somewhere, make a will, make it clear. She’d had a horror of fire ever since Hull was bombed when she was a child. Although, of course, being buried alive would be no fun either.

Marjorie Collier was knitting now, waiting for Vince to phone her. The camera kept well away from the actual knitting. Tilly had no idea how to knit so she did a lot of sighing and resting of the needles on her lap. She was pleased with how convincing it looked. It was all pretence. Acting was, let’s face it, just plain daft. Everything was daft these days. Everything was pretence. Nothing was real any more. Baseless fabric. And so on.

Came to with a start again and struggled into a sitting position and put the bedside light on. Clambered out of bed, shuffled into her slippers and went downstairs. Sat for a while at the table, she was sure she was looking for something but she couldn’t remember what. There was a fruit bowl on the table, apples and bananas rotting quietly. Saskia never ate and Tilly forgot to. She’d offered Saskia a Polo mint yesterday and she recoiled as if Tilly was peddling heroin.

She was hungry. Fancied something delicious. Douglas used to take her for afternoon tea at the Dorchester sometimes. Lovely.

Surely something could be done about the little suffering children. All of them. Tilly would lead a crusade, the children’s crusade, no, that was something different, wasn’t it? Fighting the infidel. You still saw it, boy soldiers in Africa, she’d seen a programme on the telly. It used to be the Arabs who were the infidels, now it was us. She picked up an apple, the skin was wrinkled and it felt soft in her hand. Decomposing. That was what was happening to her mind. It was decomposing.

‘Jesus, Tilly,’ Saskia said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am baking,’ Tilly announced grandly. ‘In fact, I am making a cake.’

‘You’re covered in flour,’ Saskia said. ‘The kitchen’s covered in flour. Every single pot and pan is out. It looks like a bomb’s gone off in here.’

‘Oh no, I can assure you bombs make much more mess,’Tilly said. ‘I was in Hull, you know, during the war.’