Beverley looked away, trying not to feel too wounded, but felt comforted when he reached across to take her hand in his own. She glanced down, observing the contrast between his impossibly smooth, tanned skin and her own, which was pale and paper thin, and shuddered a little. She was still a beautiful woman, there was no question about that, and she prided herself on the fact that she had never once injected any foreign bodies into her face. But in her youth, she’d been an absolute knock-out. Back then, she couldn’t walk into a room without feeling the eyes of every man present turning to look at her. Now, she sometimes felt as if she was invisible. The last time she’d found everyone turning in her direction was a couple of months earlier, when she’d strolled into the bar at Claridge’s after an afternoon’s makeover and everyone, men and women alike, had stopped talking and stared in her direction. For a moment, she felt as if she was reclaiming the power she’d wielded in her twenties, but the sensation did not last for long, for she quickly realized that they were actually looking at Judi Dench, who’d wandered in behind her and was searching the room for Maggie Smith, who was seated at a corner table with a bottle of champagne and a bowl of dry roasted peanuts, being acerbic to anyone who dared approach her.

‘You will miss me, yes?’ he asked, smiling at her now. ‘You will miss my big Ukrainian dick?’

‘Well, quite,’ she replied, laughing a little. A woman at the next table, also in her late fifties but with a lot more upholstery and a lot less refurbishment, glanced across with a disgusted expression on her face. Beverley noticed that the woman was reading her most recent novel, The Surgeon’s Broken Heart. ‘You do have a very nice dick,’ she agreed, slightly louder now, for she enjoyed scandalizing women of her own age. ‘I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel withdrawal symptoms.’

‘My body will be in Odessa,’ replied Pylyp, ‘but my dick will remain here in London. With you.’

‘What an odd thing to say,’ said Beverley, considering these words for a moment before deciding that they hadn’t come out quite as romantically as he had intended them. Still, she told herself, it was the thought that counted.

Beverley and Pylyp had originally met the previous year when she took part in the television series Strictly Come Dancing, where he was one of the professional dancers and, to her delight, was assigned as her partner. His lean body, impressive pectoral muscles and shoulder-length brown hair had overwhelmed her and, although she had never betrayed George before, it seemed to her that her husband barely noticed her these days and so the attentions of a handsome twenty-four-year-old had ultimately become too much to ignore. She hated thinking of herself as a cheat, however. It diminished a marriage that had, for so long, been rather wonderful and proved the bedrock of her existence.