Sergei had gone back to being abstracted, and Linny frankly had gone totally off the rails, all giggly and frenetic and eating way too many chocolates.

Their expressions of concern for my career seemed to have been short-lived too, even when I told them about the day I finally phoned Miracle to ask what she thought of Dark, Passionate Earth, only to have her say casually: ‘Oh, I didn’t read it – Chrissy had a quick look and said it was the usual stuff, then sent it on to Salubrious.’

So now I awaited the verdict from Tiger Tim. What if he wasn’t Suited? What if he asked for huge, impossible changes? What if he said the whole thing needed rewriting?

Tertius had told Linny the previous week that if she didn’t lose a stone quickly he was going to divorce her, because it was important in his position for his wife to look elegant, and how could she look elegant when she’d got more spare tyres than Kwik-Fit? Also, he’d booked her in for laser treatment for her facial hair as a birthday present.

Well, I did keep telling her about that, but she just said it was her Lebanese blood, and in hot countries it was thought quite sexy really, and anyway, she couldn’t stand the thought of having it lasered because she was sure it would hurt.

I said, ‘Not as much as your husband divorcing you would; not even childbirth could hurt that much, though maybe having your nose hair waxed would run it a pretty close second. How are you going to lose the weight quickly?’

‘I’m going to restrict my diet to apples, crackers and Camembert and nothing else. Then I don’t have to worry about calories or carbs or anything.’

‘Don’t you think you might get pretty sick of apples, crackers and cheese?’

‘Yes,’ she said brightly, ‘but if I go off them, I’ll lose even more weight, won’t I?’

I suppose it was no unhealthier than a lot of the diets touted about, and at least she wasn’t going to starve to death even if she stopped eating, as she was carrying enough body fat to keep her going for at least six months, if not longer, mostly around the middle, so she looked as if she was wearing one of those inflatable swimming rings under her clothes.

She did already look a bit thinner when I visited her to see how the first laser treatment went, but she’d made an excuse and phoned up to postpone that, having lost her nerve.

Then as we sat down there was this house-rocking subterranean thundering and I said to her, ‘Linny, I didn’t know the tube ran under your house. Funny I’ve never noticed it before, isn’t it?’