‘Is it not quite wonderful, the things people do for love?’ Margot smiled into space, as misty-eyed as her mascara would allow, no doubt imagining the two lovers entwined as in some magical Chagall painting. How she had even dared to just walk into their salon and plonk herself down on a sofa after their discussion the other day was beyond Jo.

‘No,’ Jo replied with spirit. ‘I think it’s sad and selfish and sordid, as a matter of fact. But then, given my own circumstances, you’d hardly expect me to bang the drum for late middle-aged encounters, would you?’

‘Now, ma chère,’ Margot replied with the kind of patronizing smile Jo had come to expect, ‘don’t sound bitter. Bitterness is not attractive.’

‘Sod attractive!’ Jo scoffed. ‘It’ll never last anyway. I’m sure Steph and David do actually love each other.’

‘You English are so funny!’ Margot shook her red curls. ‘You understand nothing about marriage. Loving someone is not enough. You must show them you love them, all the time. Every day. That is the way to make a marriage work. And this Suzi. I hear that she understands this.’

Jo almost laughed out loud, thinking of how Margot treated her own husband. The poor duke was like the runt of a litter who never gets near the teat, however hard he tries.

‘Let me tell you about one of the happiest marriages I have encountered,’ Margot wittered on. ‘I have a friend. He is the ugliest man you would ever see. Yet every day his clever wife says to him: “Julien, you are the handsomest man I know. Even at seventy you could outdo Alain Delon, the great Belmondo, even these young lions like Vincent Cassel and Brad Pitt. You would always get my golden apple.” And they have been together for fifty years.’

‘And one day she’ll get up in the morning and stick a knife in him!’ countered Jo.

‘Joanna!’ Margot looked as shocked as if she had produced a knife then and there. ‘Where do you get thoughts like this? Perhaps you should talk to someone?’

Jo just laughed. ‘You get thoughts like that if you don’t let your healthy resentments out. Speaking of healthy resentments, Margot, I am very fond of you, I really am, but you can’t just keep wandering into the château – or the vineyard for that matter – as if they still belong to you. I know you say it’s hard to let go, but you do see my point, don’t you?’

Margot gathered her skirts around her with all the contained contempt of a vitriolic Jeanne Moreau. ‘I will remove my objectionable presence from your sight at once and not trouble you with it again,’ she announced grandly and hobbled out on her ridiculous heels, leaving Jo feeling both faintly guilty and reasonably certain Margot had no intention of carrying through the threat.