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grown-up, but with me, although her opinions were more mature than mine, no subject seemed too juvenile to discuss. I had never been interested in fashion as a concept, not through any aversion to clothes but simply because I was reluctant to bother educating myself in trends I would never follow or dresses I was too young to afford. Yet after hearing Beth describing a Jean Paul Gaultier show she’d attended the previous week – she liked to check out the competition – I happily accepted her invitation to the Ungaro collection for the following season.
    It was staged in a disused monastery in the Latin Quarter, now part of the Sorbonne University, and I drank in every detail of the cluster of industry insiders gathered outside. Thewomen seemed to me dressed with studied negligence, the men in a deliberately outmoded manner as if to elevate themselves above the world they inhabited. Once inside we were seated on velvet-cushioned chairs to observe the procession of limp-limbed models saunter by, their blank eyes fixed on a distant point, like over-made-up sleepwalkers. Earnest-looking journalists from
Le Monde
or
Le Figaro
made incisive scribbles in notebooks to praise or dismiss in a single, devastating word the quality of a certain style or cloth, thereby establishing a whole psychology of fashion for the year to come.
    Fashion in Paris, Beth explained later in an overflowing brasserie on the carrefour de l’Odéon, was not the frivolous pastiche it had become in London. It was seen as a valid art form that serious men, as well as women, talked about over dinner. People laughed at fashion for being out of touch with everyday existence, but a deliberate sense of dissociation from reality was what these shows were really about: an entire industry built not on the way people actually lived or behaved, but on their aspirations.
    Later she took me to the after-show party held in Les Bains Douches, so called because the premises were in a converted public baths. The bovine bouncer at the door, standing with his legs apart as if braced for a stampede, grabbed our invitations and surveyed them with indifference.
    â€˜Allez-y,’
he relented, having impressed upon us his all-encompassing power. We stepped into a roaring din of fake laughter and the resounding smacks of air-kissing. As I listened to men with spray-on T-shirts discussing the benefits of cardio-vascular activity, I began to see what Beth had meant by dissociation from reality. My lack of attractiontowards Stephen meant that I had begun secretly to resent his presence on our outings. I wanted Beth to myself, and disliked the habit he had of turning our conversations away from us, as if determined to rob us of our companionship. When we were alone, Beth with her face propped in a frame of freckled hand, I found her willingness to listen to whatever I had to say infinitely reassuring.
    â€˜You look quite lovely tonight …’ she’d interrupted that night, eyes lazy and dark with drink. ‘I do wish you’d let me dress you next time we go out – I keep seeing things at work which would look great on you.’
    I was unused to compliments from women, and took another sip of my drink.
    â€˜Do you want to know a secret? This is the first time I’ve been to one of these “after” things since I moved here. I was dreading it,’ she continued. ‘I only came becasue I thought you might enjoy it, but it’s turned out to be quite good fun, hasn’t it?’
    â€˜Is that true?’ I replied.
    She was charming in the blue light, unaware of how beautiful she was, and I watched out of the corner of my eye as two men at the bar looked appraisingly in her direction.
    â€˜I swear. I’ve always felt, well, a bit awkward about coming to these places that are always filled with beautiful young things.’
    â€˜And by that you mean beautiful young men?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she flushed, ‘I suppose