‘While I will always treasure the recollection of our time together,’ I said sadly (and the diamonds, though of course I didn’t mention those), ‘Sergei totally betrayed my trust.’

‘But you and Linny are friends again, it seems?’

‘That’s quite a different kettle of fish,’ I told him, and he said, ‘Oh?’

But clearly there was no point in explaining the nuances of the situation to him because not only is he a man, and therefore wouldn’t understand the language, but how could he understand it when even I didn’t?

And then I added that Sergei and I had been friends for ages, nothing more, and he can’t have been missing me that much since he certainly hadn’t made a push to gain my forgiveness, apart from a few phone calls, so whatever was making him melancholy it certainly wasn’t our split. Perhaps it was a side effect of Botox?

Nathan gave me one of those disconcerting looks from his treacle-coloured eyes and said if it had been him, he wouldn’t have looked at any other woman in the first place, but if he had been so mad as to do so, he would by now have been begging me on his knees to forgive him.

Then he suddenly jumped up and got a book from his briefcase (I was starting to wonder if he took it everywhere with him, like a security blanket) and said he had been entrusted with a gift from Sergei, then handed me an advance copy of Travels Through a Life – and a big, glossy tome it turned out to be, with what looked like wads of photos, which were entirely of Sergei, I’d bet on it.

But before I had time to open it, Mel turned up and she seemed to totally unnerve him, even though practically everyone under thirty has bright green hair in clumps and rings through everything these days, so he hastily thanked me for the tea, kissed me circumspectly on the cheek, gazed deeply into my eyes again, and left …

I sighed and said, ‘Is he sexy, or what?’

Mel said he wasn’t bad, even if he was pretty geriatric.

‘Geriatric? He’s only in his thirties!’

‘Precisely,’ she said, and picking up Sergei’s book, she began to flick through it with her pointy green fingernails.

I took it off her and got her to show me my fan site instead, which was quite exciting. There had been lots of what she called ‘hits’ already, so it might augment her student loan a bit, but I did decline the offer of a prototype Dark, Passionate Earth T-shirt, since that seemed a bit too much like self-advertising, even for me.