Well, bugger me, she thought.

Just as she was thinking, dispassionately, but with an understandable degree of vanity, that both these men had wanted to fuck her, Damian returned from his pee.

‘What are you reading?’

‘Oh, just some tabloid shit …’

Poppy tried to hide the magazine, but Damian was too quick for her and grabbed it, laughing. As it clocked, the sudden change in his expression was terrifying.

‘WHAT? Ben AND that shit Jack Meadows? Oh, for fuck’s sake, Poppy, I bet you’re loving this. You’d be so much better off with one of them than you are with me, wouldn’t you? Fucking loser who hasn’t even got a job. I bet you’d love a threesome with those vain fucking cunts. Wouldn’t you? WOULDN’T YOU?’

And because she couldn’t think of anything else to say – they were both quite pissed, and she was deeply tired of Damian’s constant jealousy – she stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Yes. I would.’

Back in LA, Ben and Jack were sharing a spliff, lying in adjacent hammocks suspended from a large acacia tree whose branches stretched out over one end of Jack’s mosaic-tiled pool. His Spanish-style villa was rammed with people he’d known since he was born – veterans of the rock and film worlds, to a man. His father, who went by the improbable name of Filthy Meadows (he’d had it changed by deed poll) was trying to placate his mother, the insanely large-breasted and flashing-eyed ex-groupie Heather Meadows (née Maria Gonzalez); against all odds, they had stayed together, though sometimes Jack wished that they hadn’t.

Now she was screaming at him: ‘I know you’re still screwing that Sandra bitch!’

‘And I know you’re still screwing José.’ José was the 21-year-old Mexican pool boy. ‘Just chill, woman.’ And Filthy Meadows walked, with his signature languorous gait, over to the pool.

‘Hey, guys.’

Ben tried to sit up in his hammock – Filthy Meadows was a legend, after all – but it was too difficult, and he didn’t want to fall into the pool and completely lose his cool.

‘Hey, Filthy,’ he managed, through a fog of dope.

‘Filth to you.’ The rock star winked and Ben laughed.

‘Filth it is, then.’

Since Natalia’s abrupt departure, Ben had found himself heartbroken for the first time in his life. He had used all of the studio’s immense powers to try to find her, in all the places he thought she might have hidden: St Barts, Mustique, Necker island, all the major cities in Europe; he’d even tried Kiev. But to no avail. Natalia seemed to have vanished off the surface of the planet.

Thank fuck, he had his work to throw himself into, and, in Jack, a surprisingly good new mate. Although there had been the inevitable locking of horns between two alpha males to start with, Ben and Jack were both classically trained actors, of similar intelligence and with similar senses of humour; they found, grudgingly, that they liked one another enormously. And of course the publicity people encouraged it – the movie-loving saps always loved a good ‘bromance’.