Linny said hollowly that she knew enough already, and I said to Sergei, ‘Writing your memoirs? But – why didn’t you tell me? I thought … I mean, all this last year when you have seemed so preoccupied and—’

Then I stopped dead as something else he’d said registered. I turned back to Nathan: ‘You are a literary agent?’

‘Yes – I used to work for Bigg and Blew, but now I’ve set up on my own as the Cedar Literary Agency. I only intended doing fiction until Sergei persuaded me otherwise. And are you the Tina Devino, the novelist?’

We both laughed and agreed it was a small world, especially the publishing one, and he said he must have been stupid not to have made the connection straight away, because he’d seen me about and he’d read all my books (which he said quite unselfconsciously so – big relieved sigh – he didn’t realize he’s the frigging hero in them), which had my photo on the back. And I said yes, I was often in this part of London as I was an old friend of Sergei (the man currently looking jealous and sulky under his Pan Stik foundation), and my friend Linny also lived nearby in Primrose Hill.

Linny broke in and said, ‘Do you live nearby too, Nathan?’

He said he lived round the corner from Sergei, actually, and they’d first met in the deli and got talking about this bizarre incident when the fountain in the square had its basin filled with bleeding red roses, and then to my surprise Linny asked him straight out if he’d read one of her manuscripts.

There was hope for her writing yet if she could seize the opportunity like that, especially when at least half of what brain she possessed must have been wondering if pregnancy bras came in 36FF.

While Nathan was professionally fielding that one, I turned and took a good long look at Sergei, who shifted uneasily under my scrutiny, and asked him if he’d been fighting.

‘Not at all,’ he said stuffily. ‘I had a little fall when made dizzy by the flu and bruised my face.’

‘I don’t know about bruised,’ I said critically. ‘It looks more as if it’s been stretched, pummelled and frozen.’ But even as the words left my mouth, the penny dropped and I realized he hadn’t had flu at all, but a facelift or something else fairly radical in the Peter Pan line.

‘Oh God, Sergei, what have you done?’ I hissed, appalled. ‘I loved the character in your face, and all the wrinkles and lines! How could you?’

He vehemently denied having had a facelift at all. ‘Perhaps just a little Botox here and there, Tsarina,’ he said evasively, but I knew. (And so did Linny, she said later. She recognized the symptoms instantly, due to all her friends having had something done to their faces.)