‘Oh God, he’s not joining us, is he?’ Linny said just then, emerging from her stunned state long enough to follow the direction of my eyes and register what was happening. I was a bit surprised since she’d always fancied him, until she added distractedly: ‘I can’t think straight!’ and went totally scarlet. Obviously it was nothing personal. She was just stunned by the preggie idea and only wanted to bolt to the nearest all-night chemist, not make conversation with my sometime lover and a stranger.

‘That’s Tube Man with Sergei!’ I hissed.

‘Tube Man?’ Linny repeated, then she looked up, her eyes widening. ‘Not the Tube Man, Heathcliff of your novels? I thought you’d invented him!’

‘No, he’s real, and he’s here now and heading this way with my lover!’ I snapped. ‘Pull yourself together, Linny – I need you!’

‘Ah, Tsarina – Linny – you don’t mind if we join you?’ Sergei stated rather than asked, leaning over the table to kiss me enthusiastically and Linny rather gingerly – but that might be because Linny’s facial hair was looking particularly rampant that night, though probably that was just the lighting.

The waiter rearranged chairs and squeezed them in somehow, and I was immediately distracted from Tube Man’s presence by the sight of Sergei’s face close up, looking bruised and sort of tight and odd under heavy make-up, more as if he’d been in a fight than had the flu. I’d never known him to go out wearing full stage slap before.

Grabbing his arm, I gasped, ‘Sergei, what on earth has happened to your f—’

But he interrupted me – talked right over me, in fact. ‘Let me introduce to you Nathan Cedar, Tsarina. Nathan, this is the friend of my heart Tina Devino, and …’

His voice went on and on in the background but I was lost to the world, gazing across the table into gorgeously treacly dark eyes … Drowning unresisting in warm molasses … Sinking serendipitously into …

‘Tina!’ Linny said sharply, and I sighed deeply and came back round in time to hear Sergei lavishly ordering champagne (which he drank like water anyway) because he had something to celebrate. Knowing Sergei, I thought this could be anything from winning a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to ballet, to finding the false eyelash he lost a month previously.

Tube Man (or Nathan as I must learn to call him) and I were still sort of half-smiling at each other when Sergei announced: ‘I have written my memoirs, Tina. Full and frank in every detail, and Nathan here is representing me – and already a publisher has taken it, and serial rights have been sold to the Sunday Times, so it will be a bestseller, for clearly all wish to know about Sergei Popov!’