‘Bored? Am I?’ She looked around her, at the room that had once seemed like an enchanted fairy palace, and which now, for all its history and beauty, was just an extension of the office. ‘I suppose you’re right. You usually are.’

‘But what happens when you get what you want? When you finally take silk. What will you want then?’

‘I’ll cross that bridge if and when I come to it.’

‘Is it really enough? All of this?’ John was looking at her very directly, as if a declaration was in the offing, and then soup was slopped into their plates, and the moment was gone. When Christine could see John’s face again, the shutters were down, and they were lawyers once again. Had she hoped for more? Well, if she had, this was neither the time nor the place to pursue it – especially given her recent remarks about professional standards and personal probity.

It would really never do, would it? Dating a colleague. Dating a man who was largely responsible for keeping her in work, whose wife was dying. They would both know that there was nothing improper about it, that Ferguson McCreath briefed Christine Fairbrother because she was the woman for the job. But it might not look like that to the outside world, to the hundreds of pairs of eyes watching them as they ate and chatted at the High Table. And, in a world where one watched what one said anywhere within a five-mile radius of the Inns of Court, where one could never be too sure that someone connected with a case couldn’t overhear even the most discreet allusion, it was important to have very clean hands.

Particularly when one was going for silk.

Particularly when one is about to represent an extremely wealthy garment manufacturer in a multi-million-pound divorce case, by whom one has already been taken for lunch at L’Escargot and to whose easy Italian charms one is far from immune . . .

Christine applied herself to her soup, and looked down the hall at the hundreds of students, all of whom would give their right arm to be at the High Table, the Queen Bee, the hottest name in family practice, the one whom pop queens and movie moguls counted themselves lucky to get.

Nothing must be allowed to jeopardise that. No distractions, no affairs, nothing that would shift her focus from the one thing that mattered: taking silk. And if that meant lonely nights, so be it. She’d rather be successful and single than miserable and married. She’d been through one divorce; from now on, she’d restrict herself to other people’s.