‘Hey, Chris, how’s my favourite little cockney urchin doing?’ she said with a no-nonsense Brooklyn accent.

Chris had once described Elaine to a friend by asking him to visualise Susan Sarandon’s older, more aggressive sister. He wasn’t sure whether the actress even had an older sister, but if she did, Elaine should be her.

But that was perhaps a little unkind. Sure, he’d seen her chew out a member of her staff here at the magazine once before, and she had a reputation for being an incredibly harsh negotiator with his agency, but for Chris, she seemed to find a warmer centre, inside the sharp edges of her business persona.

‘I’m fine, a little tired… but otherwise fine,’ Chris answered.

‘Yeah?’ She appraised him. ‘You look a lot like shit. Bad flight back?’

‘It was okay. It didn’t crash, which is always a good thing.’

Elaine smiled. ‘Cute. How was South Georgia?’

Chris could quite happily never go there again. Cold, wet and rough. It really hadn’t been one of his better assignments. ‘Weather wasn’t particularly great,’ he answered flatly.

‘Oh, surely no worse than an English summer?’

Chris smiled. She wasn’t exactly the world’s most ardent Anglophile. Elaine had spent several years in London working for a sister publication. As far as Chris had worked out, the only thing she’d liked about her time in the city was the money she was being paid to tolerate it. There were many things over there that she casually described as ‘second-rate’ or ‘third-world’ to the irritation of her English colleagues, such as the ineffectual London Underground, the blandness of pub grub, the appalling cost of living and, of course, the miserable bloody weather, moans that any self-respecting Brit would happily indulge with her, if it wasn’t for the fact that she was American and quite happy to go on to say how much better things were back home.