But she was right about me talking to myself, because I was. It was getting to be a compulsive habit, so I might end up dictating my books from a chaise longue like Barbara Cartland, but without all the pink and with all the sex. I’m sure I read somewhere that she left instructions that the leaves from the tree she was buried under were to be given to writers, but I don’t know why, unless it was for inspiration. Anyway, if I got a dead leaf in the post at least I would have some idea what it was, though what could you do with one leaf? I suppose it would make a bookmark, but it would probably swoon if pressed between the pages of some of my novels.

Jackie had come to ask me to one of her parties the following Friday, and I said I would go, because you can’t get out of it when it’s one of your friends, can you? Usually I liked to keep Party Animal Tina and Shrimphaven Seaside Casual Tina quite separate, and sometimes I thought Sergei would have a fit if he saw me on the shingle with my hair blown into knots and a mac and wellies … or maybe not. I never quite knew with Sergei. But goings-on on the beach would get me drummed out of the place, that was for sure – if I didn’t get pneumonia first. I wasn’t convinced that would be quite the right kind of publicity, tempting though it was, and, anyway, I was fond of my little cottage.

Linny went quiet for three days, which was almost unheard of, and then she phoned me and said I was quite right about her sending her manuscripts out, and she’d just posted three of them to different publishers and now she couldn’t sit still, wondering when she would hear.

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath – without an agent it might be months.’

‘Do you think Miracle would take me on?’ she asked hopefully. Miracle Threaple was my agent.

‘Not unless you can transform yourself into the beautiful, born-again blonde, twenty-something daughter of a famous family – or a journalist with connections.’

‘Well, she took you on, Tina, and you’re none of those things!’

‘Yes, I am, I’m beautiful!’ I said indignantly, and of course I’m also brilliant, but modesty prevented me from adding that.

‘My great-aunt Vava in Beirut was a famous beauty.’

‘No, Linny, she was notorious, that’s different,’ I said. ‘You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, though I’m not saying raking up a few old skeletons wouldn’t be good for publicity when you do get published, because I got loads of mileage out of being left a lonely orphan at an early age, and banished off to boarding school.’