Even though I was agent-less and contract-less, I couldn’t stop writing, a bit like Jackie and her tissue-paper flowers: it was a compulsion.

Tears dripped and blistered on the paper as I scribbled and my heart sat leadenly embalmed by betrayal in my chest. But as Miracle always used to say, ‘Life’s little tragedies make such good copy, dear – don’t waste one agonizing second of them.’

Between frenzied bouts of scribbling (I always wrote the first draft longhand), alternating with hours spent crying into my pillow, I pondered various courses of action, such as phoning Sergei up and ending it, or sneaking into his flat at a time he would definitely not be there to look for clues as to who Blue Butterfly Mask was – or both.

I’d still got a key from the days when Sergei had his ancient and ailing Siamese moggy, Petruschka, so that I could pop in and see how she was when he was working. I was sure he’d forgotten I had it – I rarely went there uninvited … and look what happened when I did!

Was this why he’d been so distracted for the last year or so? He had someone else and hadn’t told me? And if so, he’d kept it very dark, because no one had dropped any hints about it to me, though Linny was usually one of the first to pick up tasty bits of gossip, her antennae covered such a wide range …

Oh God, that made me think of butterflies again.

But although I kept getting out the door key and fingering it, I managed to restrain myself. Meanwhile, the writing was very cathartic, and all my unvoiced and previously largely unacknowledged suspicions about Sergei’s faithfulness had surfaced in it, forming a scummy mat across what were once the limpid depths of our love …

I wrote that down; it could find its way into the novel.

For a couple of days I didn’t answer the phone to anyone, just checked for messages.

One of Linny’s aunts was in town, and as usual Linny was detailed for escort duty around the shops, so I knew she would be too busy to wonder why she hadn’t heard from me, but Sergei kept leaving plaintive little bulletins about his back, and how he wished he could hear the sound of my voice, and why wasn’t I answering his messages? All of which I deleted.

But after much application of the twin balms of writing and common sense to my wounded heart (and cold water to my swollen eyelids), I visited Sergei as usual early on the following Monday morning. (The common sense was Jackie’s – she said Sergei was so gorgeous she wouldn’t mind sharing him with a harem, and anyway, did I have anything better lined up? And of course I didn’t have anything lined up at all outside the pages of my novels.)