They say that only a woman can truly know what another woman wants and Lara certainly did her best. But I couldn’t divorce my body from my mind and just let go and give myself to any pleasure that might come from the experience. I felt like an out-and-out fraud and, worse still, I felt silly.

Luckily, Lara had seemed to really enjoy herself and waved away any of my inhibitions with an airy, ‘Hey, it’s your first time.’

‘Thanks,’ I said humbly.

‘Soon,’ she said, ‘we’ll have you strapping on a twelve-inch dildo!’

Jesus Christ!

I’d barely slept all night. Then she’d dropped me home this morning on the way to her yogilates class. The Drummers to the Rhythm of Life were just arriving – one or two of them said hello, clearly getting used to seeing me arrive home on a Saturday morning, still in last night’s clothes.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Lara said, driving off. ‘We’ll go out. Tell Emily I said hey’

And now here I was, flicking through Emily’s old scripts and unable to concentrate on anything. So what was I to do? I couldn’t break it off with Lara – not only did she really seem to like me, but I’d have to ‘fess up to just being a sexual tourist. And after Nadia had let her down so badly! I simply couldn’t do it.

Anyway, I’d no idea how to go about breaking it off with someone, it was so long since I’d done it. What do people say? ‘It’s not working out’? ‘I need some space’? ‘Can we still be friends?’

But if I didn’t break it off with her…?

I could see my future unrolling itself in front of me. I’d have to stay in Los Angeles for ever and be a lesbian. I couldn’t see any way out of it. I’d have to do all sorts of lezzery things that seem enticing in the occasional fantasy, but not that alluring in real life. And I’d be worn out from the regime of personal grooming that Lara would expect from me: my hair and eyebrows would need twice-weekly maintenance, and she’d brought up the question of my raggedy nails again. She’d make me go for the Brazilian wax and God knows what else.

How had I ended up in this mess? Having sex with a girl? This wasn’t me, this wasn’t the way I behaved – someone must have led me astray. But much as I’d love to, I could blame no one but myself. I forced myself to face one of the reasons I’d flirted – yes, flirted – so shamelessly with her: I’d been showing off in front of Troy and Shay. I’d been hoping to shock them or hurt them or something, because they had both, albeit in very different ways, hurt me.

What had I become? Before Lara there had been Troy, and even though the sex itself was fantastic, the entire experience left me feeling bad about myself.

At least one thing was pretty clear, I thought wryly: any suspicions I’d ever harboured that I was a bad-girl peg jammed uncomfortably into a good-girl hole had been allayed. I’d often told myself that it was a shame I’d got married at twenty-four, that I’d done myself a disservice by forgoing anonymous sex with mysterious strangers. Deep in my heart I’d felt that if I was presented with the opportunity to showcase my dormant wild-girl side, I’d be able to misbehave with the best of them.

But I’d been wrong. I wasn’t cut out for one-night stands. Unlike women like Emily or Donna, casual sex didn’t excite me; it depressed me. God, how disappointing that I was what I’d always behaved like: a dyed-in-the-wool serial monogamist. Well, who knew? Emily was right to be worried about me: I was out of control.

In despair, I sat at the desk for an indeterminate amount of time. Then I began to think of Emily, who was desperately trying to cram seven months’ work into a week. I got up and went out to her. She was still at her laptop, typing furiously.

‘Emily, can I do anything to help?’

She paused, her shoulders hunched and her purple-ringed eyes giving her the look of a raccoon.

‘I could make you something to eat. Or I could rub your neck. But not in a lezzery kind of way,’ I added, lest there be any confusion.

Slowly, she lowered her shoulders. ‘You know what, there is something you could do. I need to get out for a few hours this evening. I don’t care what we do so long as we do something. You decide.’

‘OK.’ I thought about it. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do. ‘I’d like to go out with a gang of girls and get drunk and dance around our handbags to I Will Survive”.’

‘Fabulous,’ Emily breathed. ‘Who would you like to come? Lara, obviously–’

‘No, she’s busy! Um, how about Connie?’

‘Connie? I didn’t think you liked her.’

‘Ah,’ I shrugged.

‘Is it all the wedding arrangements?’

‘It doesn’t matter as much now.’

‘And you’ve stopped asking me if everyone is married. Maggie, I finally think you’re on the mend. Now if you’d only stop getting off with people…’

‘I will, I promise. There’ll be no more.’

Connie was on for it and so was her sister Debbie. We got very glammed up in short skirts, heels and shiny make-up and went to the Bilderberg Room – so naff it had suddenly become very cool – where the men were aggressively forward and fashion ably attired in Starsky and Hutch retro. We were barely in the door when one said to me, ‘Here I am! What were your other two wishes?’ I jostled away from him, and moments later I was running my hands through my hair when I encountered another hand in it. Belonging to a brat called Dexter, who then asked me to go home with him.

But all four of us were there to dance, not to meet men, and we deflected assholes like Wonderwoman deflects bullets –which only made us even more popular. Complicated Martinis kept being bought for us, which we drank but didn’t say thank you for. And although our handbags were small enough to swing from our shoulders without injuring bystanders, for the sake of tradition we placed them on the floor beneath the glitterball – Emily’s Dior saddlebag, Connie’s mother-of-pearl Fendi, Debbie’s LV clutch and my and my JΡ Tod’s special – and danced around them.

When Connie decided she wanted to fix her lips, all four of us steamed haughtily across the floor, ignoring offers of drinks and/or fabulous sex, and went to the ladies’ room, which was a landscape of brown-cork tiling – even on the walls. The woven wicker chairs were like a ‘Readers’ Wives’ special and the smoked-glass mirrors were very ‘Last Days of Disco’. Highly stylish, of course, but not so great if you were trying to see if you’d got lipstick on your teeth.