The waiter arrived at her shoulder to top up her wineglass and she smiled up at him, a proper bewitching smile – and I saw how very beautiful she was, the planes of her face melding together so it was hard to drag your eyes away from what was almost perfection. How beautiful – and how deeply troubled. She spoke of her family and her brother and the war and the Ayatollah’s regime, and how when her mother died her father did not shed a tear. She told me of her teenage years after she left school and partied hard in London with the children of pop stars and politicians. Then she had left it behind, she said. Her diction was elegant and formal, her Iranian accent almost imperceptible, but she was edgy, nervous, constantly looking around. Occasionally she trailed off as if she couldn’t quite remember what she was saying.

‘I saw how empty and vacuous that world is.’ Her bread plate was now a sea of crumbs, but not one morsel of food had passed her lips since I’d sat down. ‘The world of nightclubs and celebrity and people who believe they are owed respect because their father once had a Number One hit or followed a fashionable cause like – like Live 8. It no longer interests me. In fact,’ she drained her glass again, ‘it disgusts me now.’

‘So what do you do yourself?’ I asked, and she gazed at me as if she didn’t see me.

‘I am retraining. I am more interested in the academic life now. The history of my nation, for example.’

She refilled her glass. I was alarmed at the speed she was drinking, but I knew it wasn’t my place to interfere. I topped up my own glass of Perrier. I was finding it hard to get a real sense of Hadi Kattan from her; she was so angry and unhappy, but vague about his current pursuits. I touched gingerly on the recent CIA investigation that Xav had mentioned.

‘Very likely.’ She shook her head vaguely. ‘But you must understand we don’t talk of such things. All we have done for a while is argue.’

‘Why did he move to the Cotswolds, do you think?’ I asked, and a sneer caused her lovely mouth to twist downwards.

‘Because he does not want people to see what he really is, and my brother persuaded him,’ she said. She twisted her glass round and round. ‘But the trouble is, Rose, the trouble is we do not belong anywhere. My family does not belong. We are neither one thing nor the other. And now this is what my brother, Ash, is trying to leave behind. He would like to be the consummate English gentleman. And what I really wanted to talk to you about was my own political beliefs. They are—’

She jumped as her phone rang in her coat pocket.