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but a beer-belly under development. ‘Not bad,’ she murmured. ‘Could make good breeding stock.’ Unfortunately, I hadn’t done a study of this one (too carried away by Victor, I suspect) and had no idea if he was single or not.
    My heart was really pounding as I clicked forward to my first shot of HIM.
    Sacha nodded, ‘He looks okay.’
    Okay ? I wanted to shriek but solemnly clicked on to the money shot – the one of him shaking hands with his team-mate and the sun warming his features and highlighting the texture of his hair.
    ‘He looks better there,’ she said. ‘Nice teeth.’
    I’d edited out most shots of him, so as not to appear biased, and we moved on to his batting companion who was shorter, with straight dark hair and a crooked nose – but not disfiguringly so. In fact, I find some crooked noses quite appealing. There were two more good-lookers in Marshalhampton and we decided that Mediterranean Man was still in the number one slot, with Victor-who-shall-not-yet-be-named at number two. Sacha christened him The Golden Smiler.
    I was feeling vaguely guilty for not fessing up to Sacha where my heart was already leaning but then, it was supposed to be an exercise in rational selection and I didn’t want her to see how impetuous I could be. In any case, he might turn out to be the kind of married man who refuses to wear jewellery, or a cosy chat over tea with Vonnie might reveal he was a serial lothario, working his way through the willing housewives of Marshalhampton and environs. No, I owed it to my plan to remain circumspect where Vic was concerned.
    Vic. I struggled with that name.
    ‘Are you going to print out the favourites and stick them on the wall?’ Sacha asked. ‘It’ll be like the X-Factor. We can put crosses on them when they’ve been evicted from the competition.’
    ‘Oh, great idea. Then if I invite one of them round for coffee, I can point out how well he’s doing.’
    We both giggled. All the same, I did paste pictures of the leaders into the spreadsheet – and called the file X-Men.
    As I put the laptop away, Sacha noticed when I winced slightly. My hand, whilst not completely shattered, was bruised. ‘What’s the matter – don’t tell me your shutter finger’s got repetitive strain, already?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’
    ‘It doesn’t look like “nothing” from here. What did you do – stop a cricket ball?’
    Immediately she said it, I looked up. I’m not great at hiding my feelings and even worse at telling lies. Dad used to say it’s because I’m a Virgo. Then again, it could be down to my mother’s catholic zeal for honesty. Probably it falls somewhere between the two – a bit like me, coloured as I am by Dad’s liberal-minded-verging-on-New-Age philosophy of life and Catholic guilt, which hangs around my mother like a woollen scarf – warm but scratchy. She felt she had a lot to be guilty about – marrying out of the faith and leaving her family in Andalucia to settle in England.
    ‘Oh my God! You stopped a cricket ball, didn’t you?’ Sacha laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you volunteered to play. That would be so desperate.’
    ‘Of course I didn’t. I just happened to be standing in the line of fire.’
    ‘Ouch. Still, I hope you milked it for all it was worth. Damsel in distress and all that,’ she said, before draining the last of her Kir.
    ‘I’m not the simpering damsel type.’
    ‘Shame. Did you cry?’
    ‘Not exactly.’
    ‘And just when you needed to suss out the chivalrous men, I bet it was a woman who came to your aid, wasn’t it?’
    She pounced on my hesitation like a cat on a bird. ‘Millie Carmichael.’ She clutched my wrist. ‘It was one of the men, wasn’t it? Oh, please tell me it was Mediterranean Man.’
    I looked back into her expectant face and told her, as matter-of-factly as I could, what had happened. After describing the unique quality of his eyes and the way small dimples formed when he smiled, I