This weight of accolade comes as no surprise because Evelyn’s judgement of people and situations is faultless. Over the years, she’s been there for me when my marriage collapsed, when my only son deserted me for his scumbag father, and the afternoon when I returned from a hospital appointment with the news that I had a tumour in my brain, and that it would probably kill me. The latter news, on top of everything else, seemed pretty much the end of everything, and yet Evelyn, with the aid of a great deal of malt whisky, gave me just an inkling that there might be an afterlife that had nothing to do with dying. And all this at the hands of a woman who has never married, never had kids of her own, and may – for all I know – still be a virgin.

That latter possibility is something that we’ve never discussed, but Evelyn is world-class at seeding tiny hints, and just now, as she serves the cheese and breaks out the port, I realize that her gift, like Pavel’s, lies in imagining life’s larger truths. In this regard, I suspect her faith helps enormously. Ever since I’ve known her, Evelyn has always attended church on Sundays, preferably C of E, but any other sacred space if need be. She once described it to me as a weekly act of surrender in the face of gathering odds (‘of growing older, my lovely, and of becoming far too successful’), and this faith of hers goes perfectly with her dislike of display or boastfulness, and with a quiet wit which can – if you’re properly tuned in – be a life-saver. The evening when she compared Berndt, my feckless ex, to a dog that even the lamp posts were frightened of was the moment I decided to divorce him.

Now, typically, she wants to listen.

‘It was in the paper,’ she says, ‘what happened in that pub over in Exmouth.’

‘To me, you mean?’

‘Yes. I imagine you needed a little time to let the dust settle. Which is why I’ve never mentioned it.’

I nod. Like Rosa, my sainted agent, Evelyn has gathered up the chaff of a difficult summer in my life and now, as a friend, she needs the kernel of that story. The bare facts are bald enough, and that’s where I start. Thanks to H, Pavel was living a life of sorts in a spacious penthouse apartment with every piece of equipment that money could buy. Blind and paralysed, he doted on his carer, Carrie, a local woman. Carrie was wonderful in countless ways – kind, loyal, gifted, athletic, luminously beautiful – but, like me, she had a habit of falling in love with the wrong men. In her case, she ended up dead, horribly mutilated, and though I was spared the same fate in that Exmouth pub, it was a very close call.