Dear Tony,

Would you please refrain from sending letters to Sergei insinuating that if he doesn’t make an honest woman of your sister you will send ‘the boys’ round to make him an offer he can’t refuse. Not only do these menacing messages profoundly puzzle him, but also even if I wanted to marry Sergei (which I don’t), it certainly wouldn’t be at shotgun point, especially sawn-off!

So butt out of my affairs.

Tina

PS: Love to Mary and the children.

The following week I went to an ordinary meeting of the Society For Women Writing Romance, although usually I only go to their parties and awards ceremonies – and, my God, they know how to party! – but they’d invited me to be part of a panel speaking for ten minutes on ‘My Writing Technique’.

The meeting was at the Arts Club, and Linny came too, to see if she could get any tips. I was quite nervous so we fortified ourselves with coffee at the Ritz first. I seemed rather to have lost my bottle for this kind of thing since the Whimpergreen incident.

Anyway, there were five of us on the panel and I was first, so I began my little piece by describing the rituals I have to perform before I start a new book.

‘For example, before I began my current novel, The Orchid Huntress, I first had to take a brand-new A4 lined pad and rip the front cover off and get a new black rollerball pen from the drawer. Then I lined up the little stone bear and the brass monkey (see no evil) on either side of the pad at exact right angles – though sometimes my friend Jackie sneaks in and covers my desk in good-luck objects, booby-trapped to fall off every time I walk across the floor, so I have to clear them off first, and the heart attack brought on by the sound of a huge crystal hitting the deck can’t be said to be lucky, and anyway that sort of thing is much better on the window refracting little rainbows about the place, isn’t it?’

I stopped for breath and the chairwoman said quickly, ‘Er, thank you very much, Tina, that was very interesting.’

I hadn’t actually finished but I must have overrun my time, so I sat back and listened to all the others. They seemed to be talking more about words per page, and how much they wrote every day and stuff, though I noticed at the end that I got most of the questions and everyone wanted to tell me what they had on their desks for good luck.

Linny said she’d learned something, and why hadn’t she been to one of the meetings before? Why, in fact, hadn’t she joined, as one of their Nouveau Novelists?