Mend your marriage...Chris & Billie style

According to some sources, Chris Evans and Billie Piper are doing all they can to save their fouryear marriage.

If that is true, they have a funny way of going about it.

Evans, 38, has struck up a relationship with advertising executive Carley Ayres after meeting her at a cookery course in Italy last weekend.

And Billie, 22, has been spotted kissing and holding hands with Iraqi businessman Bashar Ayoub.

Of course, the showbiz couple who separated six weeks ago could merely be trying to make each other jealous.

But their footloose behaviour seems at odds with reports at the weekend that they were hoping for a reconciliation.

Sources who saw Evans with 31-year-old Miss Ayres at the cookery weekend organised by his close friend, the restaurateur Aldo Zilli, say he appeared to be very much the single man.

'He certainly wasn't acting like someone who was planning to get back together with his wife,' said one.

'He started off flirting with Carley almost as soon as he met her.

Soon it was apparent to everyone that there was something going on.

'They would always sit together and they even went for dinner alone.

'And everyone was gossiping about how they spent the last night of the course together.'

After they returned to Britain on Sunday, Evans and Miss Ayres went out drinking together.

And on Monday morning the media multi-millionaire took her to her workplace in Kensington, West London.

Asked yesterday about the relationship, Peterborough-born Miss Ayres told the Mail: 'I'm sorry, but I don't want to talk about it.'

As for pop- singerturnedactress Billie, she met businessman Mr Ayoub, known as 'Bash', several weeks ago through mutual friends.

They were photographed together at the fashionable London bar Aura, hours after Billie had a so- called heart-to-heart meeting with Evans at the Groucho Club.