Back home in my own chaste bed by midnight, due to Tertius arriving home unexpectedly to find us both swooning over the preggie test, and talk about being a gooseberry – they hardly realized I was there, what with Linny being in a deep state of shock and Tershie delirious with pleasure. So I said I really wanted to get back home, and didn’t protest for once when Tershie sent me off in a taxi with a fistful of tenners, and really I ought to give the extra ones back because he gave me way too much.

Of course I phoned Sergei the second I got in because he did not generally go to bed before the dawn and probably not at all when he’d just had darts and pin-tucks sewn into his face, which had got to hurt. I could hear faint strains of music and voices chatting in the background just like most nights chez Popov.

‘Sergei,’ I said, ‘in your full and frank memoirs, what did you say about me?’

He insisted that he had named no names but just said that although he had had many lovers over the years only one woman did he truly love with all his heart, and he had referred to me simply as ‘T’.

I said people were going to guess, though, weren’t they? And by the way, were these many lovers before, or concurrent with, this great love for me?

‘Poof – they were nothing!’ he assured me, which didn’t answer anything. ‘I exaggerate, I change things a little – but mostly I write about my brilliant career and many, many successes …’

Then he started to enumerate his starring roles and I blanked it out, as usual, just like I used to do with Tim and his eternal bloody football. But from long force of habit I broke in before he got on to the subject of the overweight ballerina who had so irrevocably strained his back while he was lifting her and so prematurely ended his career, and asked, ‘But can I read it now, Sergei, so I know what to expect?’

‘No, my beloved Tina, because I wish to place the first copy of the book into your hands myself,’ he said, which sounded romantic enough except that by then millions of Sunday Times readers, me included, would already have seen chunks of it.

Eventually I gave up. ‘I’ll have to go, Sergei – I’m exhausted,’ I said, and I must have been, because I forgot to tell him about Linny’s news – not that it had quite sunk in, it seemed so improbable.

‘Goodnight, my darling Tsarina,’ he said in his terribly sexy voice, but it didn’t seem to work when I knew he looked like Frankenstein’s monster after a Trinny and Susannah makeover.