Christopher had laughed. He could see that solid-looking, bespectacled Adam Winterton would not be Nicola’s glass of champagne at all. ‘Well he is nice, but I’ve never considered him in the least bit dull so you’d be wrong about the last bit. He’s got a reputation for being extremely clever.’

‘Oh, clever! What’s that got to do with it?’ said Nicola dismissively, though she was exceptionally bright herself.

He said teasingly: ‘Perhaps we should take the initiative. I liked the “leggy blonde” myself – she’s amusing. I might ring Adam and try to fix something for the four of us.’

But a week after that sunlit evening of music in the Oxfordshire countryside, with the heady scents of wisteria and mown grass mingling with whiffs of champagne and cigars, with swifts screaming across the garden and adding their own top notes to those of Rossini, life had completely changed for Christopher and Nicola.

Chapter Ten

By nine o’clock, eight people were seated with Catherine round the table in the small conference room with their pens and paper at the ready. Stanley Heslington was notable by his absence but Win was there. Catherine glanced at her watch, waited a moment and then sent her an enquiring look, but Win did not seem inclined to have her eye caught and appeared preoccupied with her notebook. Catherine decided it would be better to start without him. She was beginning to have her own ideas about who she thought might be going to benefit from the course, but Stanley was not one of them.

She suggested that over the next two days everyone should write a short piece about a journey. It could be a story or an article but it should be two thousand words long.

‘What happens if we get so carried away that it’s much, much longer?’ asked Bunty, opening her rather protuberant blue eyes even wider than usual, a look she had worked on and perfected in her youth and still fancied gave her a kittenish charm. She was under the illusion that the Colonel might find this appealing.

‘Then I’m afraid we mightn’t have time to discuss it properly,’ said Catherine, ‘which would be a pity. Besides, if you want to write professionally it’s a good idea to get a feel for the word count. So many magazines have to turn down good material because it’s not the right length for their particular publication.’

‘I think it ought to be the author’s own instinct which decides the length,’ objected Bunty, pouting like a thwarted child.