Playing Her Cards Right. Rosa Temple

agreed to walk me through some aspects of working with different grades of leather. I had never gone to ground level with my bag designs before.

      My current designers, along with Clara in Paris, helped me to start from the very basics until I was gradually up to speed on what it took to produce a bag design that was ready to go to production. I knew I wasn’t perfect; I knew the professionals were making exceptions but I was learning all the time.

      I was on a roll, excited about the company and excited about the secret piece of joy growing inside me. At home, I had started to accumulate a pile of pregnancy books. They sat beside my bedside table when they were piled too high to sit on the table itself. I read them as the weeks counted down to my first hospital appointment. I was exhausted a lot of the time and often fell asleep before I could finish a chapter. According to one of the many books I’d bought, the baby was approximately the size of a walnut.

      So many times I wanted to break the news to everyone but I had my first antenatal appointment scheduled and I was saving the announcement for a better time. A time when my news wasn’t going to fade into the background for one thing. A lot was going on with everyone around me.

      For example, my best friend, Anya, was out of the country again. She was in the middle of shooting another film. She had more lines compared to the role she’d had in last year’s shoot and although not the leading lady, her reputation alone was causing a storm of attention in the media and totally putting the movie’s female lead in the shadows.

      From what I could tell, the trained actors resented singers or models who landed roles in films based on the popularity of a song or an appearance in a perfume commercial. I could imagine the resentment they felt but I saw Anya in the last film and she was talented as an actress.

      Anya had a way of putting all the women she stood next to in the shade. Her tall, slender, and intimidatingly icy presence saw to that. If you didn’t know Anya you’d suspect she was made of ice. She rarely smiled (she feared the Botox needle), she never frowned (same reason as before), and I’d only ever known her to cry full-on tears once in the ten years we’d been friends. I loved Anya.

      ‘I can’t believe my best friend is a Hollywood star,’ I said to her on FaceTime one evening. I had been working late in my studio. Anya and I had spent the last two weeks just missing the other by nanoseconds.

      ‘It’s not so much of a big deal, Madge. You meet von film star, you’ve met them all. All self-absorbed and self-important. Not like models.’

      I stifled a laugh because I was pretty sure Anya was being serious.

      ‘So when will you be back in London?’ I asked.

      ‘Vell, ve have finished rehearsal and filming for my scenes should be over in a month. Then I plan an extended holiday vith Henry. I feel as if I haven’t seen him in a long time.’

      ‘Maybe because you haven’t.’

      Anya’s boyfriend was a lot older than she was, an ex-politician who left the government under a cloud of gossip and accusations, he had since returned to his original profession in law. He’d been busy setting up his own practice. I knew Anya was looking forward to moving into the new house they’d bought together.

      ‘Vell, I don’t feel as if I’ve seen you either,’ said Anya. ‘Not in the flesh anyvay and not since you led that ring of pushers into France vith their handbags.’

      ‘Don’t joke about. I still have nightmares.’

      ‘I’m not surprised, darling. I saw an episode of Orange is the New Black and I know I could never do prison.’

      ‘I know, right? You know they wear jumpsuits in prison? Those things never suited me. The cut isn’t right for my shape.’

      Anya laughed and asked me what else was new in my life.

      My hospital appointment was two days away, just forty-eight hours to the announcement of the century. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her the news but I had this overwhelming feeling that I wanted to give my friend the news in the flesh to properly see her reaction. Who knows, I might have been treated to a very rare – and therefore very valued – Anya hug.

      So I told Anya all about the designs for my Every Woman handbag, as I was calling it, and that the designs were very close to going to the manufacturing team.