I mean, take their novels. If they aren’t deeply melancholy they don’t seem to have any plot, they’re just aimed at depressing you, although War and Peace is a bit different, and if you miss out the war it’s quite a quick, fun read … So then Nathan said no, Sergei hadn’t always been like that, and he used to have a bit of joie de vivre about him, and I refrained from saying that I used to know all about that.

Sergei asked Nathan if he’d seen me lately, and if so, how was I doing, and he wanted to be remembered to me, as if I was about to forget about him, which, short of sudden Alzheimer’s, is highly unlikely. Even then, probably my last coherent image, hanging in the air like the Cheshire cat’s grin, would be of Sergei in mid-leap.

Apparently on Sergei’s last visit he’d fallen into a mood of nostalgia, and said I was the most beautiful woman in the world, small but perfectly formed like a dryad. And he would always love me passionately, but he was afraid he had been discarded for another.

Nathan had assured him that, as far as he knew, there was no other man in my life – and of course his relationship with me was purely a businesslike one of author and agent, and Sergei then said that Nathan was his good friend and embraced him.

Well, I thought about that for a minute, and really, Nathan had his head screwed on the right way, even if he was a sucker for the type of women who were going to dump him for something more exciting at the first opportunity!

Nathan said that Rachel had come in last time Sergei had visited and been introduced, and Sergei had told her she would be quite pretty if she had a bit more meat on her bones, slender yet curvaceous like his beloved Tina, and she should eat more butter and cream, advice that went down like a lead balloon from the sound of it; and even while we were having our little tête-à-tête with the scones, Runaway Rachel rang his mobile twice, probably to check out who or what he was doing.

Nathan was kind to her in an exasperated way, so if he didn’t watch it I thought he would end up married to her after all (if she didn’t take off with the vicar mid-ceremony), because he was too nice to turn her down.

He asked me if I missed Sergei as much as he seemed to miss me, and his eyes briefly rested on the photos turned to face the wall like naughty schoolchildren, though draping them in deepest mourning-black underwear might have been more descriptive of my feelings.