And it wasn’t just Alice she was escaping. In the library, in study group, in the Red Door cafe, last night in this very room, something that used to work wasn’t working any more. 

She turned on her bed. Straight ahead was a huge floating desk with an iMac on an anglepoise arm. Vitsoe bookshelves stacked with books and memorabilia from Angie’s childhood all the way up to now. She remembered the emails Bee had sent when she was designing this room. We want it to be perfect, sweetheart. Or, This is your space, we want you to love it. But when she looked around now, at the sweet little reading nook and the huge framed prints by Toyin Ojih Odutola and Lorna Simpson, her eye kept going to the stack of printouts and the closed MacBook. 

There was a knock on the door. Angie lurched awake. She was sweating and had no idea what time it was. The knock came again.

‘Angie?’

Alice. Angie wondered if she could ignore her, but then the door just opened. 

‘What the fuck?’

Alice looked surprised that Angie was surprised.

‘You don’t wait for “come in”?’ Angie asked.

‘It was open!’

‘No, it wasn’t. Unlocked and open are two different states.’

‘Well, when I don’t want anyone to come in, I lock the door.’

Angie sighed. ‘What do you want?’

‘Do you have any Tampax? No one menstruates here.’

They stared at each other. Alice, it suddenly occurred to Angie, looked awful. Just awful. Her eyes lifeless, her mouth in a permanent droop. She clutched Joan Didion to her like a life preserver.

‘Have you eaten?’ Angie asked.

‘When? I had Donettes in the car.’

Angie got off the bed, went into her en suite and came back with a box of Tampax. 

‘Thanks.’

‘C’mon,’ said Angie, turning her earthmother round to face out the door. ‘I think you need to eat.’

***

By mid morning Peggy was indeed prowling round looking for unkempt women to feed to her beauticians, or Peggy’s Angels, as nobody except her called them. Bette and Helena dodged her at the tasting room, the staff break room and the fermentation block, but were cornered in the estate office. 

‘Dylan, Concetta and Alice are having manicures right now,’ Peggy announced, as though a manicure were life-saving surgery.