‘It is nothing – some repairs I am having done. The noise is making my head go throb-throb-throb!’ he intoned sepulchrally. ‘I think it will soon explode!’

‘Well, that would certainly make for an interesting obituary,’ I said callously, and he said that his health was not a joking matter and he was a pitiful wreck of his former self.

I wore a linen-mix suit in a deep but subtle shade of dark red for the photo session, and redid my eyeliner three times as my hands were shaking so much from nerves. If I was going to be famous one day I really ought to get used to this sort of thing.

Just as I was ready, Jackie rushed in and insisted on pinning this rather tacky crystal angel brooch (with wire halo) on to my jacket, and I don’t mean one of those discreet and cute little pin ones either. She was now heavily into angels and imagined they were hovering about protecting her all the time, though I’d have thought they’d got better things to do than watch Jackie make mountains of paper flowers or hand-bind books.

The brooch was huge and I hoped the pin wouldn’t leave a hole in my lapel afterwards. It certainly didn’t go with the diamond heart, which sparkled beautifully, but it was a kind thought from Jackie in a cruel world, so I had to wait until I was in the taxi and we’d driven round the corner of the harbour before I could remove it and pop it into my handbag, since she stood waving me away on the doorstep like a proud mother. (And although she is much older than me, she is not quite that old.) If I did have angels watching my every move, goodness knew what they thought of the ones involving Sergei, though come to think of it, goodness didn’t really come into it: he was brilliant … So perhaps I ought to think seriously about forgiving him?

Jackie’s last major craze was feng shui. She never discarded the previous one, just added a new layer of wackiness on top, and she drove me totally crackers with all that rearranging of furniture and ornaments and sneaking into my study when she came round for coffee, hanging wooden flutes from the ceiling, not to mention the incident with the big crystal.

She was also responsible for the hideous three-legged frog with a coin in its mouth that sat on a shelf in the hall right next to the meter, as though it had just hopped in. And though I expect it had a lot of spring, what puzzled me was – if it was a real one – how on earth did it excrete? But then, I have always been prone to these earthy thoughts and often wish that Jane Austen and the Brontës had been more forthcoming about the nitty-gritty of their daily lives.