She stared at me. ‘But everyone said you and Sergei had split up!’

‘Everyone is wrong then, aren’t they? Just like everyone saying you and Nathan had split up, but these days hearts can be so seamlessly mended you’d never even know where the join was … and will you excuse me, because I need to go and write that last sentence down.’

I left her on the doorstep, and I’d dug out a pen and notebook from my bag and made a note of it for The Orchid Huntress before I heard the door close. She could have caught her death of cold … with a little luck.

Then I walked on round the corner and suddenly everything sort of hit me and I felt totally humiliated as though I’d been caught trying to prostitute myself, and clearly Nathan would rather have a skinny young girl than me and he was just keeping this gullible old author sweet.

I wandered on without noticing where, but my feet automatically took me right to Sergei’s door, though I didn’t realize it until I found myself nose to nose with a brass knocker shaped like a pair of ballet shoes, with no recollection of getting there. I was just about to turn away when it swung open to reveal Sergei, with his glowing, slightly manic dark eyes and dishevelled black hair.

‘At last! At last you have forgiven me, my Tina – my darling!’ he exclaimed in a voice breaking with emotion, then swept me into a rib-crackingly muscular embrace.

After that it was hard enough to concentrate on breathing, let alone thinking, and perhaps thinking is something I do too much of anyway and should give up.

Much later I rang Linny and told her where I was, and she said, ‘What about the pearls?’

Straight to the point as usual. ‘Sergei was going to take them and have them made into a necklace for me anyway, for my birthday. And we’ve been talking—’

She giggled, ‘Well, that’s one word for it!’

I continued, with dignity: ‘We’ve been talking, and Sergei wants to show the world how much he loves me, so we are getting engaged.’

She shrieked, ‘Engaged! You’re getting married? Are you mad?’

‘No, of course we aren’t getting married, there’s no way we could live together as man and wife! We are just getting engaged, that’s all.’

She said she could see where I was coming from because it was terribly trendy to get engaged and it needn’t lead to anything, and were we going to have a party?

‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but perhaps we could book Lemonia, what do you think?’