In hindsight, she shouldn’t have had that last cocktail on Saturday night. Or all that fizzy wine with dinner, or the round of Madeiran liqueurs afterwards. She’d been so jubilant at the prospect of staying on holiday for another week, though – maybe even longer! – that she just hadn’t been able to say no. After dinner they’d ended up in the Hollywood bar, where the pianist played jazzy versions of show tunes, and she’d polished off another cocktail, urged on by Patsy and Kate. It was something sickly and lurid, with bobbing segments of orange and a glacé cherry, and it had tipped her from being drunk to . . . well, to being completely blotto, unfortunately. Uninhibited. Out of control.

She had a dim recollection of plonking herself down at the piano, when the resident pianist took a break, and calling ‘Any requests?’, before playing a stumbling rendition of ‘Copacabana’. Possibly even some Neil Diamond as well. It was all rather hazy now, but she had the distinct feeling she might have been singing along, just to put the icing on the cake.

Oh, Jeanie, she had been saying to herself ever since, in the manner of a very disappointed great-aunt. What were you thinking?

She was thinking that she was young – that was what. She was thinking that she was young and free and naughty, that she was having the time of her life. There she was, far from Harry (the liar! the cheater! the betrayer!), far from her children and her neighbours and her friends. Miles and miles, in fact, from anyone who might judge her or give her a look, or put the brakes on her behaviour in any way.

Having slid from the piano stool at the pianist’s return, she was laughing and bowing to nobody in particular just as Luis appeared, and any last shred of caution had been well and truly left behind. ‘Here he is! Here’s my handsome darling,’ she called, hurrying back to her friends’ table and patting the seat next to her coquettishly. ‘Get that gorgeous little bottom over here immediately.’ (It went without saying that remembering this made her want to curl up in a foetal position under the bedcovers and not emerge for several hundred years, if ever.)

Luis, of course, had been his usual charming self. ‘But how can I refuse?’ he had replied, sitting down. ‘I am the lucky one today, yes?’

‘Oh yes,’ Jeanie said, sliding one hand daringly onto his thigh. (Cringe.) ‘Your luck is well and truly in tonight, sweetheart.’ (Double cringe.) She plucked the glacé cherry from her glass and held it teasingly in mid-air. ‘Would you like to pop my cherry?’ she’d giggled, before taking it in her teeth and offering her mouth to his. (Death by cringing.)