He certainly didn’t need the money either, being cleverer with his investments than many people would expect, so his ballet teaching and SergeiYoga classes were because he liked doing them. He just sort of presided over the exercise classes anyway, which were actually taken by relays of out-of-work ballet dancers. He still spent hours every day exercising, though what he was keeping fit for I leave to your imagination. At least he’d be in trim for the new exercise DVD when they started to shoot it.

Ballet in some form was his life, just as writing was mine, and the critiquing, which I could give up now, of course, though I thought I would really miss it, so I wasn’t going to stop just yet.

And let’s be practical here: how many novelists sign a big contract with a major publisher and then that’s the last you ever hear of them? They don’t earn out their vast advance, the next one’s given no publicity, and then it’s ‘Goodbye, we’ll have to let you go …’ I could still go up with the rocket and down with the stick, and I could name you a round half-dozen off the top of my head who’ve done just that.

Nathan said I was being paranoid, I’d made it, but I told him, ‘Not until one of my novels is a film!’

The Orchid Huntress, which I’d finished bar a polish, could be the one to break into the wonderful world of moving pictures, preferably before some bright spark decided Sergei’s spicy memoirs would make an even better one.

But who on earth could they get to play his part? It’s as if there can only ever be one truly amazingly attractive male ballet star at a time, and he was it for his generation, though Grigor was shaping up very well for the next.

Linny was busy writing another Mills & Boon while awaiting the advent of her offspring, but she’d also suddenly gained a keen interest in genealogy and was tracing her family history, which apparently now numbered an exiled Slavic princeling among her ancestors, though it was the first I’d heard of it.

Mind you, she said anything was possible when you had a Lebanese grandmother, which was unanswerable really, and I wondered whether records were harder to trace out there.

However, she looked perfectly unselfconscious while telling Tershie all about her findings while I was there one day, so maybe I have a deeply suspicious mind to think she might just have been hedging her bets.

Our lives had all settled into a perfectly acceptable new pattern, so I had no intention of stirring anything up. I didn’t see why I couldn’t go on like this for ever, only, I hoped, with more bestsellers, a film or two and a bit of security in the form of a queen’s ransom in diamonds.

Thirty-Two