‘I looked at it myself,’ Dinah says loudly. ‘It’s full of moth holes.’

‘Shh. Now this is ours,’ I say to her. ‘The lot with the Ossie Clarks. Everyone loves them.’

I bid decisively, but despite stretching my limit, the first dress, a black crêpe dress with a plunging keyhole neckline, goes for four hundred and sixty pounds to a phone bidder, way above the upper estimate and well over my maximum. Overseas buyers, probably. An Ossie Clark/Celia Birtwell for Radley printed rayon dress goes for five hundred pounds. I haven’t got a hope of affording them.

The serious bidders, it seems, are there for Chanel. ‘The fight of the Chanels,’ Tallulah Young calls it as the bids go higher and higher for a pristine purple tweed suit and a jacket with a chinchilla fur collar. Dinah can hardly contain her excitement as a lot of two suits exceeds its top estimate by nine hundred and fifty pounds.

As the hammer goes down she sinks back in her chair, fanning herself with her catalogue.

Disappointingly, we lose out on the op art suits and minidresses, but I don’t stay despondent for long because our next lot comes up: ‘Ten evening/afternoon dresses, mainly 1930s, including black chiffon example, the yoke and sleeves with zigzag inserts of red, a sequinned skullcap, navy blue bias-cut chiffon gown and others, busts approximately 32 to 40 inches.’

My heart is thudding each time I raise the paddle and I’m relieved when I manage to buy them mid-estimate. I feel completely drained. Dinah’s absolutely thrilled that we’ve bought a whole bundle of clothes and she’s sitting beaming on the edge of her seat.

Mostly, I’m grateful that I haven’t got carried away by auction fever.

When the morning session is over, I nudge Dinah. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

Before we leave I pay by bank transfer. We’ll go back later to pick up the dresses and in the meantime, we stop for a lunchtime glass of wine and a bowl of olives outside a pub.

Dinah is surprisingly subdued, and she unclips her earrings and drops them into her handbag. I assume that, like me, the whole process has exhausted her, but as she spears an olive with a cocktail stick she starts to talk about her own collection.

‘You know how I feel about my wardrobe?’ she says, her excited dark eyes searching mine.

‘Yes,’ I reply cautiously, thinking of Moss’s comments that she was peculiar about it.

‘But now I see they’re worth all that money!’

‘Yes.’ I’m surprised that she’s surprised.

‘I’ve been thinking. Could I sell some clothes in the auction?’ She chews the olive thoughtfully.

‘You could, of course, but why would you want to do that?’