I know that when I say that it’s like, `What? You’re 46 and you still think that’s gonna happen?’ and yes, I do, I really do.”Meanwhile she is broadening her options in the media. Of course I look after myself – I diet now, which I never used to and I go to the gym – but not more than anyone else. My mom, who is 72 and looks about 50, warned me that women with our Mongolian blood stay beautiful-looking longer than most, and then, overnight, they look 2,000 years old.” Helvin looks down at her frail, ringed hands, the hands of a Ming empress, and gives the smallest shudder. But she’s not about to hang up her Blahniks just yet.”I’m still waiting for that one big job, that one big contract that will make my fortune. “I know I don’t look my age but it’s not something I aspire to. Sure, I want to look good – it’s my job to look good – but I don’t necessarily want to look younger Everybody knows how old I am. If I was going to start lying about my age I shoulda done that 20 years ago.

Partly, one suspects, because she still has the body of a fortunate 20-year-old, and partly because she genuinely sees her looks as a gift, or a professional resource rather than as an attribute.”I’m a freak of nature,” she says cheerily. “What happens to a model when she’s not a model anymore? Either she goes completely anal or she goes dippy. I guess I’m taking the dippy route.” At 46, Helvin betrays none of the edginess common to beauties d’un certain age. There is no wistfulness, just a kind of shoulders- back honesty when she says, “I’m good at many, many things, but the one thing I’ve never been good at is relationships.

I’ve had moments, and some major lovers, but I never really had a great relationship. If you believe, as I do believe, in reincarnation, they say that every time you come back, it’s because you have to finish something. I’ve a funny feeling that my thing in this life is to have one relationship after another. Perhaps, in a former life, I was some real horrible bitch who was just so horrible to men that now I am being paid back for it.”The belief in reincarnation, the spiritual retreats, the doctrine of fastings and colonic irrigation (Helvin is the author of Bodypure, a best- selling beauty de-tox plan) are all unfeigned but Helvin has the appealing knack of being entirely sincere without taking herself entirely seriously “Look,” she says. She declines to talk about her recent affair with the actor Neal Pearson, but this, you sense, is more to do with honour than self-preservation. Not a mistress – I could never be kept – but a courtesan with my own rules.”Helvin’s candour on these matters could wrong-foot the sternest critic.

And to the day I die there will always be some asshole who will come up to me in a supermarket and ask me to sign one of those fucking pussy pictures. There was one in particular, where I was completely naked, wrapped up in newspapers, spreadeagled, thinking, `Please God, why am I doing this? Why can’t I just say No?’” Just once, Helvin rebelled. “Bailey and his sponsor, Olympus, were after the ultimate photograph. They wanted me to go into hospital and swallow some photo-optic cable so they could photograph my womb I guess it was a kind of possession.

In all the time that I was with Bailey, he was never, ever without a camera He slept with it on the bedside table. It wasn’t so much an instrument to him, as an extra sense, like a third eye or an extra cock. And,” says Helvin smoothly, almost sweetly, “he just couldn’t put it away.”She can laugh, now, at the irony of the constitutionally unfaithful Bailey divorcing her on grounds of her adultery Helvin has never made great claims for monogamy “I think I’m living in the wrong century,” she says “I would have made a great courtesan. And then he said (whining weasel voice) `I’m thinking of putting some of these pictures we’ve been doing at weekends into a book,’ and I said, `Oh, yes, sure.’ By the time I realised that it was actually happening there was nothing to do but walk away from it.