Afterwards I invited him back for tea at the cottage – Ramona and Linny too, of course. But Ramona had to dash because if she left her dog in the car for too long it ate the upholstery, and Linny had to rush back to town in order to get ready for something – not the birth, that was months away – so it was just the two of us.

I showed Nathan round my garden first, which didn’t take long, six pebbles and a bit of samphire by a driftwood log, and even Sergei wouldn’t dare to get up to anything in there because he would certainly be arrested. Then I gave Nathan a quick guided tour of the cottage, not lingering in my tiny bedroom, because Earth girls aren’t easy, and though it may have begun to seem like a decade since I’d last had sex with anyone I didn’t wish to appear at all needy, besides the strange dichotomy of Nathan being rather come-on-ish on the phone, but much more reserved in the flesh, apart from the expression in his warm, dark brown eyes …

Really, I was starting to find all these mixed signals rather confusing so clearly I was out of practice.

We had tea in my little sitting room and fortunately I had large quantities of scones, clotted cream and strawberry jam in, ready for Mel (who I am convinced has a tapeworm, since she is stick thin except for a little round pot belly, but eats voraciously) because she was coming round later to show me my fan club website, HotBeds. But I knew she wouldn’t mind sacrificing some of the scones in a good cause.

But perhaps he was too good and I was too wary, for although we were very friendly (and it’s difficult to be anything else on a sofa the size of a large armchair), we weren’t that friendly, especially when he somehow got on to the subject of cricket over the tea and scones, which seemed to be a Pavlovian trigger to happy reminiscences.

Why do men always have an engrossing interest in something boring? You try and tap their depths only to find there aren’t any, just throwbacks to the playground involving balls of one kind or another …

And why do so many women pretend they share that interest? But not me: I told him straight out that I found all sport a bafflingly strange way of going on, and would rather not think about it, let alone talk about it, so he changed the subject to Sergei, with whom he seems, disconcertingly, to be getting quite friendly.

Sergei had started calling in to see him once or twice a week, and Nathan said he looked deeply gloomy. I said, ‘Well, he’s a Russian, what do you expect?’