The next two months, almost to the day, are equally blissful. As west London surrenders to late autumn, I put McFaul and all of Budleigh behind me and get on with my life. Rosa conveys my congratulations to the Paris-based screen writer on doing such a fine job on her adaptation of Dimanche, and within days word arrives from Paris that the role of the lead cop, Danielle Colbert, will very probably be mine. As soon as the Exec Producer has returned from a shoot in the Adriatic, he’ll be in touch.

In the meantime, back home in Holland Park, I have a couple of days intense prep on the Beeb radio script before we gather for the read-through in the bowels of Broadcasting House. This is a period piece, a political drama exploring some of the murkier outcomes of the Bristol slave trade. I play the wife of a wealthy merchant and a complex set of events leaves me on the verge of taking my own life. This moment of crisis finds me in the Avon gorge. The tide has peaked and I can’t swim. To die or not to die?

I have a longish passage of angst-ridden monologue to resolve this dilemma and as I try voicing it a couple of ways, I can’t help thinking of Christianne. She, of course, found herself in a far uglier trap, but the essence of acting is a wholesale surrender to the character and the situation, and once I’ve managed to fine-tune the performance I think I’ve glimpsed the relief that comes with taking a decision like that. The producer certainly thinks so.

‘Christ,’ she says. ‘It’s like you’ve actually done it.’

Should I be flattered? I think not. Life, as Pavel once told me, deserves a great deal of contemplation. Look hard enough, and there are no secrets left.

The play is broadcast at the end of October on the evening the clocks go back, and excites mild interest on Twitter. Evelyn has put the word around in Budleigh and comes up to town a week or so later for a couple of days chez moi. Rites of Passage, she tells me, has done my reputation no harm. Bill Penny loved it, and even Nathan Kline spared the time to listen.

‘What did Beth make of it?’

‘She wouldn’t say. She wants to talk to you personally.’

‘Like when?’ Beth appears to have forgiven me.

‘That’s what I said, but you know what she’s like. She has to put her own smell on everything.’

Her own smell on everything. Perfect.

‘And that dog of Bill’s? The one she was crazy about?’