‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I am.’ Isabelle realised that she was standing with her mouth open, looking simple. ‘It’s just . . . Oh, I don’t know, it’s such a big hill to climb. Starting out in business, all this stuff to deal with. I’m no good at that.’ She gestured at the paperwork. ‘Figures. Projections. Cash flow. I don’t understand it.’

‘That’s why you need me, Princess, and don’t you forget it. Before I reinvented myself as the fabulously fashionable creature and all-round gorgeous man-about-town you see standing here, I worked for my Dad’s haulage company and did a degree in business studies. How glamorous is that?’

‘Not very.’

‘Precisely. It’s not all chiffon and bugle beads, you know. Someone in this partnership has to have his feet on the ground.’

‘And that would be you, would it?’

‘Come on. You need some fresh air. Let’s go for lunch.’

‘And where are you taking me? L’Escargot? The Ivy?’

‘I thought we’d go to Al’s. You know. Al Fresco. Sarnies in the square. What do you say?’

Isabelle wanted to say that she’d rather eat sandwiches sitting on the ground with Will than eat plover’s eggs off solid gold plates with anyone else, but instead she said ‘Oh, go on then. You certainly know how to treat a lady.’

While her daughter happily munched bacon and egg sandwiches from a Hoxton café with her gay best friend/business partner/definitely-not-boyfriend, Christine was a mile and a half to the south west, preparing to remove her clothes in the entirely unfamiliar surroundings of a gym changing room, around the corner from her chambers in Middle Temple. There were far too many full-length mirrors around for her liking, not to mention women half her age who could strip off without the slightest hesitation, just as she had done in her twenties, and well into her thirties. But now that she was in her forties, her mid forties even – she refused, at least until she was forty-nine, to consider them her late forties – she hesitated. Gravity had been kind enough to her face, and she looked good in the clothes that suited her – but naked? That was a different matter. And so she had booked herself in for an assessment with a personal trainer – something she never imagined she would do, like bungee jumping, or smoking crack.

But then again, she never imagined she’d be single again at forty-seven. What was it Linda had called her? ‘A single lady.’ When she surveyed the dating pool in her professional life – serial divorcers, middle-aged mummy’s boys, elderly barristers with food in their beards – she realised that she was going to have to start fishing in different waters. And if she wanted to get a nibble, she needed the confidence to take her clothes off in front of a relative stranger. Exercise was indicated. And who knows? She might meet people. Nothing so crass as dating a trainer, obviously – but this gym prided itself on being the choice of professionals. She’d seen a few decidedly attractive gentlemen of roughly her vintage, thundering away on the running machines. Perhaps one of them . . .