‘But there’s plenty of men out there with no redeeming features at all! Plenty of women too, for that matter!’

‘Yes, in real life! But is that what you want from a novel? Real life?’

‘Well, some semblance of it, yes.’

‘Then go read one of Maude Avery’s miserable dirges. But don’t bother with any of mine.’

‘In general, I don’t.’

‘In general you don’t what?’

‘Bother with any of yours. No offence.’

Beverley laughed. ‘How could that possibly be offensive?’ She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in through her nose, trying to maintain some sort of equilibrium. ‘You’re quite the sly boots, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I do. I wonder what goes on inside your mind.’

‘Quite a lot, actually.’

‘Well, you’ll never find a husband if you insist on proving that to everyone. Nobody likes a clever woman. But look, I’m not here to discuss your inadequacies as a person or your oh-so-highbrow taste in literature. I’m here to discuss my novel. The novel that will have my name on the cover and my name on the spine and that I will end up defending on Woman’s Hour while Emma Barnett takes pot-shots at me. Now look at this here.’ She lifted a page that was so full of red marks that it looked as if it had been leeched. ‘This flashback scene. Where Marcel is remembering his first romantic encounter with his late wife.’

‘Yes? What about it?’

‘I mean … have you read it?

‘Yes. I wrote it.’

‘This line. This outrageous line. Reader, he raped her.’

‘I thought that was rather good.’

‘And you’re the one who says you don’t want it to be all Jane Austen!’

‘That was Charlotte Brontë.’

‘Same difference. How on earth is Carolyn supposed to fall in love and marry a man who is a rapist? Do you honestly think the reader is going to want that to happen?’

‘No, but that’s the point. She’s not going to fall in love with him and she’s not going to marry him.’

Beverley looked utterly bewildered now.

‘Then who is she going to marry?’ she asked.

‘No one.’

‘What do you mean, no one?’

‘I mean, no one. She’s not going to marry at all. She’s going to remain single.’

‘My dear,’ said Beverley in a careful voice. ‘All my novels end with a marriage. They have to.’

‘But why?’ asked the ghost. ‘Why do they have to?’

‘Because they’re the rules!’

‘So break the rules! What if, rather than having your heroine find fulfilment only through marrying a man, she ditched that man as being beneath her and went off to find it in another way? Through her work, for example? Or, perhaps, with another woman? Or with a non-binary—’