I met Ingrid Schroeder, my husband’s potential lover, at the Arts Club, where I was a member. I couldn’t afford it these days but I kept up the subscription – albeit with eyes slightly averted when the email came through – because, in my mind, it was central to my operations. Call it subliminal, but I felt being on home territory played in my favour, gave me a tiny advantage, which put my guest on the back foot – historically, likewise, the tennis club, now prohibitively expensive. In any event, it was the rendezvous of choice and a good one. Nevertheless, when I came up the steps from Green Park tube, it wasn’t without some trepidation: a little flutter of nerves. I was ten minutes early so as to be in situ when she arrived. To my surprise, however, when I’d pushed through the old oak doors, greeted the doorman and walked into the members’ room, Ingrid was already there. She was perched on a stool at the bar, a glass of white wine in hand. Given that you had to be a member to buy a drink, I was taken aback. She was talking to a tall, portly-looking chap with attractive, smiling eyes who was leaning on the bar beside her, listening attentively.

‘Lucy,’ she said coolly, looking round as I approached. She didn’t get up to greet me, which meant I had to bend down to kiss her cheeks. ‘I was early and made the awful faux pas of swanning in and ordering a drink, not knowing that wasn’t the form. This gallant gent saved me and put it on his sheet – wasn’t that kind?’

‘Very,’ I agreed, shaking hands with the gallant gent, who introduced himself as Tim Farrow, a publisher I’d heard of slightly, but who certainly wouldn’t know me. He politely pretended he did, though, and we exchanged a bit of publishing small talk and then he excused himself and said he was off to lunch at the members’ table. He disappeared into the dining room, but not without giving Ingrid a last wistful glance. She was well out of his league.

Ingrid was one of those ice-cool Scandinavian blondes who would have been ravishing in her youth and was still quite something. She had a slightly transatlantic lilt to her Nordic accent, having been brought up in various different countries by a rich industrialist father, but had married a fellow Swede, Lars Schroeder, who was in property, and they’d settled over here. But the marriage was shaky. Open, even. All this I’d gleaned from her manicurist, after Millie Taylor let slip she and Ingrid had a regular Tuesday slot at a nail bar in Parsons Green. See what I mean about research?