Nathan, who had listened to all this with his cup of coffee suspended in mid-air and an expression of utmost – if slightly stunned – interest, said Sergei had given him all his cuttings to look at, and since he also subscribed to the ones about me (something I didn’t know – sweet of Sergei!), he was pretty au fait with the situation, and then we started to skirt around the tricky bits, and he delicately asked, since I’d apparently been close friends with Sergei for years, how I felt about the autobiography being serialized in the national press.

Looking deeply into his treacle-brown eyes, I said I had nothing to hide, but Sergei had assured me that he hadn’t mentioned my name in his book, or gone into specific detail, which I hoped was true. But even so, it would probably all be raked up again, especially those fuzzy pictures of the woman with Sergei in the garden, which they were all insinuating was me.

‘So, actually it wasn’t you in the garden?’

‘Oh, no!’ I assured him, with the limpid truthfulness engendered by lust (though had he had a garden larger than a window box, who knows how the meeting might have ended?) and then decided to follow through and, picking the woman least likely to have done any such thing, said on impulse: ‘Actually, in deepest confidence, it was my old friend Linny, but it was a temporary weakness, one of those spring things, you know, and she deeply regrets it. She and Sergei hardly speak now, which makes it so difficult for me.’ I could hardly keep my face straight, but I expect he thought the slight choking was due to emotion.

‘Yes, I can see that it would make things difficult,’ he said thoughtfully, but agreed that any publicity was great, even publicity based on unfounded rumour.

Then he said, probing carefully, ‘You and Sergei are still …?’

Helpfully I assured him that my relationship with Sergei had been warm but platonic for ages (well, hours, really) but Sergei had a jealous nature.

He said he understood, though I wasn’t sure that I did, and added that he’d only intended to represent novelists, until Sergei had insisted on him handling his rights when he’d found out that he was an agent, and it was such a big coup that he couldn’t resist. And I could see he was worried that he might lose a big client if he showed more interest in me than Sergei liked … or at least that’s what I hoped he was worried about.

He’d already found out quite a bit about my sales figures and stuff, though don’t ask me how, and thought Salubrious would now definitely want to take up the options clause on the next book because Dark, Passionate Earth seemed set to do very well, but thought we could perhaps get a better offer elsewhere.