‘D’you like fairgrounds too?’ he shouted.

‘Oh, my God, yes, rollercoasters, valtzers, all of them! All those things make you feel alive, don’t you think? Speed and being turned upside down and round and round! I love it all!’ Her blonde hair was taken by the wind, her face aglow.

‘Me too! I love all that stuff – never understood people who say it makes them feel sick.’

‘Oh, not me, I am never sick.’

Natalia smiled again and Ben realized that whatever he thought he had felt for anybody in his previous life was utterly meaningless.

Once Natalia had agreed to spend the day with him, Ben had decided to take control. He remembered a beautiful island, the Île du Levant, that he and his drama-school mates had picnicked on, all those years ago, and reckoned it would be a lovely, romantic place to take his Hitchcock blonde. They had gone to the covered market in Saint-Tropez to buy lettuce, tomatoes so ripe they looked as if they might burst, some ham and a baguette, still warm from the boulangerie’s oven. Neither of them needed more food than this. In fact, most of the baguette would probably remain untouched, but it smelled amazing and looked appropriately Gallic (or possibly phallic) sticking out of its paper bag.

Pavel, Ben’s director, had a speedboat that he was happy to lend his supporting actor on his day off, and here they were, racing across the sparkling sea, which gradually, as they approached the island, started to change from deep navy to a vivid clear turquoise.

‘Beautiful,’ said Natalia, as the island rose from the water to greet them, all rocky coves, powdery white beaches and lush, pine-covered hills. They drew up at the jetty, moored the speedboat and stepped onto land.

NUDISME OBLIGATOIRE proclaimed an enormous sign.

‘Ah,’ said Ben. ‘I promise it wasn’t obligatoire when I came here before.’ Oh, for fuck’s sake, how could he have forgotten the nudists? He was almost convinced that he and his RADA mates hadn’t been sitting around in the altogether as they discussed Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter with the earnest pretension of the young, making one another laugh with Pinteresque pauses. But they had been very stoned a lot of the time back then. Hence the Pinteresque pauses, he supposed. In retrospect.

Natalia was going to think this was a really ghastly ploy of his to persuade her to get her kit off.

But when he looked at her again, she was laughing and pulling her top over her head.

‘I’ll do it if you will.’

‘OK.’

He took his shorts off, trying not to gawp at her amazingly long, lean body. Natalia, meanwhile, was trying not to look at Ben’s cock, which was just as staggeringly perfect as the rest of him.

Two families that were clearly English – two mothers, two fathers and several burnt, freckly children – walked past, laden with beach bags, towels, hats, buckets and spades, trying to hide their bodies behind lilos. They looked hideously embarrassed to have ended up on an island where nudism was obligatoire, but, Blitz spirit intact, were not going to head back to their villa with their tails between their legs. So to speak.