The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle. Rebecca Campbell

of sex I tore my attention away from the engrossing spectacle beyond. I looked around. Milo had disappeared, the serpent. He’d probably been looking for the chance to dump the philosopher on somebody all day.

      ‘Sex?’ I said a little more loudly than I intended, resulting in a couple of turned heads. I had been caught off guard, but Parisian propositions were hardly novel, and I had a coping strategy to hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t I meet you tonight?’

      I named a café in Montmartre, a place to which I’d never been, nor had any intention of ever going. It’s my standard way of dealing with that sort of pass. It always works. And when you don’t turn up, they either think something poetic and tragic might have happened to you and hold you in a special place in their hearts all their lives, or they curse you for ten minutes and then forget all about it.

      Penny burst forth from the wigwam. Her hair, which had been tightly and precisely coiled into a chignon had broken free, and hung raggedly across her face, with a stray clump pointing to ten o’clock. Somehow her neat knee-length skirt had revolved a hundred and eighty degrees, and the split pointed accusingly at her navel. The audience broke into spontaneous applause, and hissed the gendarmes as they laid rough hands upon her.

      ‘Write down, please,’ demanded Malheurbe. I scribbled something on the piece of paper he shoved at me, and he scuttled off, clearly thinking that what was said about English girls was all true. The spell was broken, and I ran towards Penny. By the time I reached the crowd I saw that I had been beaten to it. Milo, in perfect, mellifluous French, was gently soothing the gendarmes and flirting with the PV officials. Penny looked upon her saviour with eyes of Magdalenic devotion, and would, I’m sure, have washed his feet, dried them with her hair, and anointed them with fragrant oils, had the necessary equipment and sufficient privacy been available.

      And that’s about it really, incident wise. No charges were made against Penny and she fortunately missed the satirical endpiece on the French early evening news. The next day was like the one before, except with more cloth, less philosophy, and a dramatic reduction in Penny-centred art installation-oriented mishaps. On Saturday morning we flicked off the safety catch and gave Paris another burst of semi-automatic shopping, and then it was Eurostar and home. And yes, I thought lots more about Liam. And yes, the idea of sleeping with him, just once, or maybe twice, if it was nice, had grown in my mind, nurtured by boredom, and Penny’s haphazard malice. But no, at that stage, constancy, faithfulness, devotion, and love had the better, just, of abandonment, concupiscence (my favourite word since ‘A’ levels, O dishy Mr Carapace, dreamy stand-in teacher of English, and inciter of teenage lust!) and revenge.