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played a London ad executive who is called home to Scotland to run her family’s distillery. “Whisky flowed on that set, darling,” she says, sounding somewhat wistful.
    Price never married, though her memoir is dotted with men who vary from bad to worse. Somewhere along the way, she had a child, Charles, who is curiously absent from the book. When I ask her about the young man, who would be 24 today, she bridles. “The story I told is the one I wanted to tell,” she says stiffly, before excusing herself to go to the ladies’. “There wasn’t the need to drag the whole world into it.”
    Yikes! I wonder for a moment if I’ve blundered beyond repair (indeed, an acquaintance of Price’s will tell me later that she and her son are estranged, and that the young man lives in California).
    When she returns, though, all seems to be forgiven. Lipstick freshly applied, charm fully in place, Price is ready to answer all questions. So what does the future hold? Apparently she is now trying to decide between two high-profile television projects, both of which have meaty roles for her.
    “Darling,” she says, with such a pleasing smile that you really do want to believe her. “I’m not sure how I earned this much good fortune. I feel I should be knocking wood, or I’ll jinx myself.”

six
    The pestilent scourge of breakfast meetings had laid waste to early-morning London. Roustabouts no longer lolled in bed, nursing their hangovers. Instead, they arrived scoured like copper pots at restaurants like this, a vast, echoing space in Piccadilly that had once been a car showroom. It was the only place to properly advertise one’s continued role in the running of things.
    Politicians and their special advisers, dames and knights, censured comedians — all gathered on the leather banquettes, looking over their companions’ shoulders every time the door opened. Menus the size of briefcases were placed in their hands by silently gliding waiters, but no one ever looked at them. They ordered what they always ordered, and lived for the day when the waiter would say, with a small smile, “The same again, sir?”
    Augusta was no longer a regular here, or at any establishment with tablecloths. For the first few moments she’d gloried at being back in the thick of things, but the thrill soon died. The din was murder on her hearing. “What was that again?” she bellowed to the bearded man beside her. His voice was moist in her ear: “I was just saying that I remember it as if it were yesterday. I came like a V2.”
    She edged away from him on the banquette. “If we’d had relations in a makeup chair, Andrew, I would certainly have remembered.”
    He laughed and pulled a crumb from his luxuriant grey beard. The gesture rang a tiny, muted bell somewhere in the back of Augusta’s mind. Of course she remembered, but the vain old goat hardly deserved the succour of her reminiscence. It hadn’t been a makeup chair, it had been a frantic five minutes in the costume trailer, Augusta trying to remember her lines over Andrew’s heaving back. A filthy Cardiff spring, twenty years before. Andrew had played a car thief turned football coach, and she had been . . . a paramedic? A social worker?
    “Detective,” Andrew supplied, sighing deeply.
    He was now a television star, famous for playing a deaf veterinarian who solved crime in the Shetlands. Augusta had arrived at the restaurant uncharacteristically early, eager to meet her agent and draw the map of her comeback trail. As she sat by herself, assessing her crow’s feet in the dull reflection of a butter knife, Andrew had spotted her and strolled over.
    “I thought I might have made your book. Your memoir .” He gave the word an exaggerated French pronunciation.
    “You read it, did you?”
    “Flipped through it anyway, at the newsagent’s. Surprised to see there was no index.”
    That , Augusta thought, is so vain twats like you would buy it.
    “Andrew,” she said sweetly,