I was. I really was and I knew it. Flushed with pleasure, I handed the small posy of white roses back to the stewardess who promised to put them in water. Then, when we got to Majorca, I transferred them to a vase in the room I shared with Sara for the week. I felt a thrill of pleasure every time I saw them on my girls’ sunbathing holiday. How had he managed that? Talked the stewardess into it? Well of course, Michael would find a way.

When we got back to a heaving Stansted, at some godforsaken hour in the morning, girding our loins for the Tube to London, he surprised me again. Because there he was, smiling at the barrier, ready to whisk me away to his flat in his convertible MG. No room for anyone else, sadly, by the time my luggage was in, so my girlfriends – who, if they had boyfriends, had boys their own age who barely even had cars – were left gaping in astonishment. I was indeed a very lucky girl.

We were an established couple by now, and did pretty much everything together, although Helena encouraged me to have my own life. She said it was healthier, and I got the point of that, to keep up with friends my age, even though I was totally immersed in his glamorous, clever Cambridge set. They were mostly in the arts, either actors or writers, and had met in the Footlights, which Michael hadn’t quite got into. He’d wanted to act, he told me, but hadn’t cut the mustard. Michael had lots of friends, and was very much the life and soul, but strangely, after a party, he was always quiet on the way home. I knew not to break into his thoughts. If I did, he’d snap at me for wittering, but then instantly recover and apologize profusely: say he’d forgotten himself, which was a good way of putting it. He genuinely had.

My own friends he indulged now and then, but he wasn’t overly keen on mixing too much, and I could see why. He’d moved on from chat about internships and the cost of London rentals forcing them out to places like Crouch End, which he’d never even heard of. He was polite, but I could tell it bored him.

So following Helena’s advice – and trust me, my sister’s quite bossy – I went on my own to supper parties, one of which was indeed in Crouch End. When I emerged at about midnight, there he was, in his blue MG, waiting for me. I stopped in surprise on the pavement. The passenger door swung open and I leaned in and stared at him in astonishment.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Back end of bloody beyond,’ he grumbled. ‘How are you supposed to get home from here? No cabs are ever going to take you.’