At fifty-two Saul Petrov was just beginning to notice his friends weren’t quite as brilliant, not quite as clever, not quite as slim as they once were. In fact, most had begun to bore him. And he’d noticed a telltale yawn or two from them as well. They were growing thick and bald and dull, and he suspected he was too. It wasn’t so bad that women rarely looked at him any more or that he’d begun to consider trading his downhill skis for cross country, or that his GP had scheduled his first prostate test. He could accept all that. What woke Saul Petrov at two in the morning, and whispered in his ears in the voice that had warned him as a child that lions lived under his bed, was the certainty that people now found him boring. He’d take deep dark breaths of the night air, trying to reassure himself that the stifled yawn of his dinner companion was because of the wine or the magret de canard or the warmth in the Montreal restaurant, wrapped as they were in their sensible winter sweaters.

But still the night voice growled and warned of dangers ahead. Of impending disaster. Of telling tales too long, of an attention span too short, of seeing the whites of too many eyes. Of glances, fast and discreet, at watches. When can they reasonably leave him? Of eyes scanning the room, desperate for more stimulating company.

And so he’d allowed himself to be seduced by CC. Seduced and devoured so that the lion under the bed had become the lion in the bed. He’d begun to suspect this self-absorbed woman had finally finished absorbing herself, her husband and even that disaster of a daughter and was now busy absorbing him.

He’d already become cruel in her company. And he’d begun despising himself. But not quite as much as he despised her.

‘It’s a brilliant book,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘I mean, really. Who wouldn’t want this?’ She waved it in his face. ‘People’ll eat it up. There’re so many troubled people out there.’ She turned now and actually looked out their hotel room window at the building opposite, as though surveying her ‘people’. ‘I did this for them.’ Now she turned back to him, her eyes wide and sincere.

Does she believe it? he wondered.

He’d read the book, of course. Be Calm she’d called it, after the company she’d founded a few years ago, which was a laugh given the bundle of nerves she actually was. The anxious, nervous hands, constantly smoothing and straightening. The snippy responses, the impatience that spilled over into anger.

Calm was not a word anyone would apply to CC de Poitiers, despite her placid, frozen exterior.