Car or walk? I dithered. The lanes were choked with cars, everyone having to pull over and wait in hedgerows while others passed in the opposite direction, so although driving should be quicker, I put my shoes back on and ran instead. Or jogged. I wasn't that fit. I must have cut an unusual figure puffing up the sandy track past our cottage, which was also a public footpath, and I was aware of families with picnic baskets making their way down for the beach supper giving me strange looks as I went against the traffic.

As I soldiered on, I recalled Christina's chumminess over Belinda: I liked it. I'd never heard her criticize her before, but then I'd never talked to Christina much at all. She'd tried but I'd been difficult. Frosty. And to her credit, she'd nonetheless never stopping trying. As I jogged on, feeling the strain in my thighs now, breathless and hot, it occurred to me that our relationship could be very different and my heart soared as I realized how happy Peter would be about that: Hugo, too, as we had lunch, or shopped together. What a difference it would make to everyone. As long as there wasn't a family scandal, of course, with the Bellingdons on the front page of every paper, as Ted had threatened. Headlining the six o’clock news. Feeling slightly sick, I quickened my pace.

Around the next bend the track finally became gravel, the prelude to the Bellingdon estate proper. A cattle grid heralded the entrance, no formal gates. Roger had put his foot down even though Belinda had wanted them. "A cattle grid was good enough for my father and his father before him, so it's good enough for me!" he'd roared. One of the few battles his wife hadn't won. I hopped over it now and then jogged on up to the gravel sweep, complete with stone fountain in the middle, very definitely a Belinda addition, installed when Roger was in India for a month. With Babs, as it happened. Even Belinda had realized she had to distress it, so pristine and nouveau did the stone appear, so she threw yoghurt and cow dung at it, and perhaps imagined Babs’ face, as she did.