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bearlike appearance. If the photographers could see her now, there would be a very different photograph on the front of the tabloids tomorrow.
    Downstairs, she entered her compact office. Once, rooms such as these had served as dens for husbands who smoked pipes in comfort and isolated themselves from the daily domestic routine. She sifted through the latest batch of letters, answered a few and chose the ones she would use in her column. Shortly before meeting Robert, she had enrolled in a media studies course, fitting her lectures around her modelling assignments. She now had her degree and a regular column in Weekend Flair, a Sunday newspaper supplement magazine. Carla was under no illusions that the reason she had been approached by the editor had more to do with herAnticipation profile than her media degree. But the number of letters kept rising from women seeking advice on morning sickness and weird hunger urges. Some letters amused her, others were so filled with pain and frustration that she shrank from answering them in her column, aware of her own inexperience. In such instances she passed them on to Alyssa Faye.
    She was also beginning to receive commissions from other magazines. The feature in Pizzazz was excellent. She picked up the celebrity magazine from her desk and flicked through the pages until she came to the ‘before and after’ feature she had written about the refurbishment of their end-of-terrace Georgian house. When the alterations had first begun, she had taken photographs of the resulting chaos and these photographs had been juxtaposed against a photoshoot of the finished results. So far, she had not shown the magazine to Robert; the memory of the row that followed her decision to write the feature in the first place was still fresh in her mind.
    ‘Absolutely no way,’ he had declared when he heard that a photographer intended photographing each room in their house. ‘I’ve no intention of allowing our lives to feature in some cheap, pretentious magazine.’
    ‘Cheap?’ Carla, used to having the camera trained on her, had been astonished by his reaction. ‘There’s nothing cheap about Pizzazz. ’
    ‘The title says it all,’ he declared. ‘“Pizzazz”. How could you possibly want us to feature in such a vacuous publication?’
    ‘It’s not vacuous and everyone wants to feature in it.’
    ‘Everyone?’ He scoffed. ‘Who the hell is everyone?’
    ‘It’s for Raine’s sake.’ She had changed direction, aware of how shallow she sounded, or rather, she thought, how shallow he had made her sound. ‘She’s invested everything in herpublicity campaign. This is another opportunity to promote Anticipation.’
    ‘Not at my expense,’ he had argued. ‘I insist you cancel the arrangement.’
    ‘ Insist? ’ Carla was outraged by his arrogance.
    ‘You used to protect my anonymity,’ he retorted. ‘Now you want to splatter my private life everywhere.’
    ‘What’s to splatter?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t expect you to appear in the photographs. I’m not that stupid.’
    ‘I never said you were stupid. But you need to slow down on the exposure you get. It’s different now. You have to think of others besides yourself.’
    ‘Come off it, Robert,’ she retorted. ‘The average junkie is hardly likely to have Pizzazz on his reading list.’
    When he paid no attention to her arguments, she cried. Her tears were genuine but under control. She had a modelling assignment the following day and could not afford a ravaged face. Robert had never seen her cry. His anger was immediately replaced by concern and, eventually, by capitulation.
    ‘I want our privacy to be respected, especially when our baby comes along,’ he had warned her. ‘This is the last time anyone from the media sets foot in our house.’
    Looking at the glossy photographs, Carla wondered if he had been right to object. Seen through the lens of the camera, their house looked larger, more luxurious and dramatic than