Usually I arrive on a Friday evening and we sit in the kitchen by the Aga and eat a meal prepared and cooked by Ellen: baked beetroot or baby scallops in a cream sauce, corn-on-the-cob oozing organic butter, or poached wild salmon with dill. This Friday it was fresh tuna and lime with a green salad. Ellen cares about food, so I eat, apparendy appreciative. What I care about is the two bottles of wine we allow ourselves. How this routine has come about is a mystery, a ritual with no foundation. We drink two bottles of wine on the first night I arrive. Of course, I drink the lion’s share but I’m allowed no more. Ellen follows me up the stairs and wishes me good night, fussing until I’m in bed. Anywhere else and I would slip from the bed and go to the drinks cabinet in the library but not at Ellen’s. Never again.

The first time I stayed overnight at Ellen’s, not long after she’d left the hospital, I did just that. I was thirty-eight years old and I crept from my room, like a schoolgirl, looking into the unfamiliar darkness, an adventure looming, a deception forming. I felt my way down the unfamiliar, crooked stairs, my hands running over the knobbled, sandy walls of the Cotswold house until my toes found carpet and I shuffled through the dark hallway to the library, hoping the dogs would ignore me. One flapped a lazy tongue at my ankle as I passed him sleeping. I knew that in the corner of the room was the matte black triangular corner cabinet left to Ellen by her grandmother and I made my way towards it, only to slam my knee into the corner of a marble-top coffee table. I hopped and rubbed my leg until the pain had passed, then opened the door to the cabinet. I found a bottle of Canadian Crown Royal whisky and slipped it out of its mauve velvet bag before finding a glass. Just one glass, I thought, as the sweet, mashed alcohol hit the back of my throat.

It was, of course, Ellen who woke me, wordlessly, the next morning. She shook my shoulder and stood over me as I surfaced from the lake of fermented grain in which I had temporarily drowned. Ellen is a tall, rangy woman, with one breast and a grip of steel. She grabbed the shoulder of my dressing-gown, pulled me to my feet and dragged me through the house — I began to appreciate just how spacious it was — and then she threw me outside the back door, on to the stone path. I tripped and fell, grazing the heels of my hands and tearing my knees. She stood in the doorway and in her hand she held the empty Crown Royal bottle. She lifted it in such a way that its curving belly caught the morning sun and shimmered. Then she opened her fingers. The bottle smashed on the path, scattering shards of glass around me. To be honest I was a tad touchy about that - about shards of glass flying around me. Ellen threw a dustpan and brush at me. ‘Clear it up’ she said, and closed the door.