‘You know what I mean! Come on, it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow, just enjoy tonight as a treat. It doesn’t have to mean something It’s a story you can tell everyone at the next WI meeting. Just relax, don’t read too much into it. Enjoy the moment, Sue.’

Trouble was that was exactly the very thing that Sue was worst at.

‘Your next course,’ the waiter told her as he pulled Sue’s chair out for her. ‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh ham hock pie, finished with gold leaf.’

‘Are you sure that’s edible?’ Sue asked him.

‘Quite sure.’ The waiter smiled. ‘And also it’s an aphrodisiac.’

‘Oh well, we don’t need one of those,’ Sue said, taking a long draught from her glass of wine, which was immediately replenished.

‘No, we’re naturally passionate people,’ Blake assured the waiter.

‘You shouldn’t have said that, tomorrow there’ll be a story in the papers that you are having an affair with a dowdy, middle-aged woman,’ Sue laughed.

‘Hardly dowdy,’ Blake corrected her. ‘And there won’t be any stories in the press. Everyone here has signed binding confidentiality agreements.’

‘I haven’t,’ Sue said.

‘You didn’t need to,’ Blake told her. ‘Look, I know you think I’m the man on the moon, someone who doesn’t know anything about real life, but in my business the only way to survive is to be a good judge of character. I know that you’re a good person, I know I can trust you.’

‘Do you now.’ Sue shook her head, as she looked closely at Blake. Once she saw through his charisma and charm, once she stopped looking at him as the face she had only ever seen up close on a big screen, she could see that he really was just an ordinary man, greying around the temples, wrinkles around his eyes, slightly jowly under his famous jawline. He wasn’t perfect, which somehow made him all the more beautiful to look at.

‘So, tell me about your husband,’ Blake said.

‘He’s left me,’ Sue replied, too tired to come up with lies or excuses. And oddly, the more she said the truth out loud, the less awful it seemed. ‘I haven’t told the children yet. And I don’t know what I’m going to tell them when he isn’t there on Christmas Day.’

‘He hasn’t called to make arrangements?’ Blake took her revelation in his stride, with quiet concern, and Sue supposed that in the world he lived in the end of a marriage was as commonplace as a … Sue realised she had no idea what was commonplace in Hollywood. A face lift perhaps? A round of Botox?