Perhaps, for the moment, she wouldn’t say anything.

She could see a yacht ahead.

Bare, white, oiled bodies sprawling on the foredeck. They must be mad. The sun might be shining, but it wasn’t that hot.

Sally threw the fenders over the side, pulled in towards the stern of The Bitch Got The House and gave a shout.

‘Hi there! La Mosaïque! Your luncheon order.’

A plump dark-haired man in nothing but a pair of white shorts leaned over the side. Sally noticed his greying temples. ‘I’ll send the boy down.’ Even if he hadn’t spoken Sally knew as soon as she set eyes on him that he must be English. No one else would dress like that at the end of March. It was sunny but cold.

A teenaged boy slouched down the steps and took the box from Sally. She went back into the wheelhouse, ready to move off. But the dark-haired man called down: ‘Before you go I’ll have to check it. I know all about you fly-by-night outfits.’

Sally gritted her teeth.

She was really not in the mood for this.

With no sense of haste, the man lay back down on his lounger and waited till the boy arrived at his side with her box. Sally could hear female giggles; presumably the girlfriends she’d seen earlier on the deck, now out of her sightline.

Slowly the man untied the pink ribbon.

Sally could hear the females whispering to him.

‘Apparently this is not what my, er, pretty friends ordered.’ The man stood, hands on hips.

Sally took the receipt from her pocket and read it aloud.

‘Two portions of hake, green beans, peas and, um, toast.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said the man, gripping the starboard guard-rail and leaning down. ‘No. No. This will not do.’

One of the women appeared behind him – a young blonde with unnaturally large lips and breasts, wearing a bikini so skimpy it was barely more than two pieces of string. Sally could see goose-pimples rising on the flesh of her arms. How mad to wear swimwear, simply because the sun was out and they were on a yacht! Hadn’t they noticed that on every passing yacht the crew were fully clothed?

‘Tell her, Snooky.’

‘It’s OK. I have this under control. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.’

The girl took a step forward, looking down at Sally in every possible way. Another surgically enhanced girl moved into the picture. They both snuggled up to ‘Snooky’. Sally barely managed to disguise her revulsion as they started stroking ‘Snooky’s’ impenetrably dark, hairy chest.

‘I’m just the delivery service.’ She couldn’t help thinking that the man’s chest looked like a dirty doormat. ‘I have brought you what you ordered.’

‘Now look here, you old bint. You people might want to work up all this healthy-eating malarkey, but when a customer orders baked beans, toast and chips, that’s what the customer wants, and it is your bloody duty to provide it. Not this pretentious rubbish. We don’t want it. I want my money back.’