He’d left a light on and the wooden shutters were not quite pulled across, so I could see into the flat through the airy muslin curtains … And then – quite suddenly – something big in nude pink and wearing a feathered blue butterfly mask darted fast past the window and was closely, if more slowly, followed by a satyr-masked and totally naked Sergei, clearly about to get a Popov someone that was not me.

Well, the next thing I recall was standing by the little fountain in the gardens nearby, the water in the white marble shell-shaped basin beneath all covered in a mat of roses leaking red dye, like the aftermath of a watery St Valentine’s Day Massacre, which it was, come to think of it, and then I came to my senses and made off hastily towards home before anyone caught me.

I just couldn’t face even Linny just then, though why I should feel so hurt when I sort of half-suspected I wasn’t the only one in Sergei’s life and had just been kidding myself I was, I didn’t know. But seeing it in the all-too-solid flesh was something else entirely.

And yes, I know I’d been mentally unfaithful to Sergei with Tube Man on several occasions, not to mention between the pages of my books with numerous sexy heroes, but none of that counted, did it? I didn’t care what anyone said, carnal thoughts were not the same as carnal goings-on.

Who was that woman in the butterfly mask? (If it was a woman, that is, for I only noticed the mask because she – he? – was looking back over one shoulder … and yes, of course it was a woman. I couldn’t start doubting Sergei’s inclinations, even if I did have serious grounds for doubting his fidelity.)

I got home somehow, though I don’t remember much about that either, except that I am sure I cried the whole way because my face looked like a red sponge in the hall mirror. I expect my fellow passengers on the train ignored my tears with true British embarrassment or perhaps nervousness engendered by my scarlet-stained hands.

In my absence my neighbour had taken delivery of a Valentine arrangement of expensive orchids, which he passed to me over the fence as I was fumbling with the door key. (My eyes were a bit swollen, so it was hard to see what I was doing.)

They were from Sergei, of course, and simply too beautiful to jump up and down on … and in fact the whole scenario, with the roses and the unfaithfulness and the orchids and the doubts, not to mention the Lady Macbeth aspects, suddenly all clicked in my head so that I immediately dropped the novel I’d begun and started writing a new one, to be called The Orchid Huntress.