But by then I generally saw Sergei only on Monday mornings and the furthest we ever got out was to walk round to Lemonia for lunch occasionally. He just seemed to want to stay at home. Perhaps he was simply getting older. And so was I (older than he thought!). Sometimes when he leaped on me I wasn’t sure I’d got the stamina any more and I wished someone would ring a bell and end the bout.

Of course, I had always been aware that he had this other life, because I could have become part of it when we first embarked on our grand passion. But I chose not to because, despite loving him madly, I simply couldn’t do with all that ballet, not to mention all the arty types draped around his flat most evenings, any more than I could do with my ex-husband’s mania for football. I was not prepared to fake enthusiasm for anything, including bad sex (fortunately not a consideration with Sergei), besides not liking to live with anyone, so clearly I was not cut out for marriage, or indeed any other kind of permanent relationship. Sergei said I reminded him of his beloved cat, Petruschka (deceased), which was good, but Linny said I had the emotional depth of a puddle and when I finally lost my looks I would decline into a lonely and embittered spinsterhood.

Anyway, that Monday morning, after tea and fish eggs I staggered round to Linny’s to recover before I caught the train home. It was quite a walk really because although Sergei always says he lives in Primrose Hill, his garden flat is actually on the furthest fringes of Chalk Farm and you’d drop off it if you went further, while Linny is in the posh part and can see famous geriatric dads playing outside with their second- or third-marriage toddlers any day of the week.

Poor Linny was in absolute despair because the publishers weren’t taking on any new writers unless they were skinny blonde twenty-somethings with interesting connections, and look at her, fat, dark and the wrong side of forty, with a facial hair problem. I wouldn’t say she looks like a walrus but she should get that ’tache waxed more often … So we had coffee and I agreed it was all dreadful, and it was so hard to break in with a first novel, and yes, rejection was really hard to take – so personal, when your novels are just like your babies, and what on earth could she do?

So then I suggested she stopped stuffing her novels into filing cabinet drawers and actually sent them out to editors or agents. (Or even me!) She burst into tears and said she couldn’t possibly show anybody one of her efforts, could she? And I said I couldn’t think of any other way of getting published and she told me I was a hard woman.