I’ve never done that again — sneaked through her house to drink her dry. Because I now respect her too much to do that; perhaps I respect her fury too much to do it again. I don’t know. She allows me to drink in moderation because, she says, she can’t stop me drinking. And she’s right. So, better to have a few to take off the edge and then go to bed, policed by my own contrition. Also, she points out, she herself has a cocktail of drugs she must take each day. As she says, not by choice but they’re still drugs. Seems churlish to deny me mine. In moderation.

I did eventually ease myself to my feet that morning, my cut hands and knees smarting, to sweep the shards and splinters of glass from the path into a dustpan and dump it in the rubbish bin, whimpering and hating myself for the sound. I walked slowly back up the path, dressed in a flimsy, blood-, whisky- and ash-stained dressing-gown, to the stable door that had been slammed on me and knocked tentatively. Ellen threw it open, still angered, and pointed to the sink, where plasters, Savlon and bandages had been laid out. I dressed my minor wounds as she stood at the Aga, furiously swirling bacon and mushrooms round a griddle. She slammed down a plate of tomatoes, toast, egg, sausage, bacon and mushrooms, next to a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and brewed coffee, single breast jiggling alarmingly beneath her brushed cotton shirt. There was just the one plate. Now, drunks don’t eat but I sat there, newly plastered, and ate that breakfast as Ellen leaned against the silver bar of the Aga, her tightly held mug of coffee steaming. I ate the food and drank the juice, held the coffee cup in my hands, sitting at the scarred, stained kitchen table, yearning for a cigarette.

Ellen looked at me, her face set. ‘You can only come here if you promise never to do that again.’

‘But I didn’t intend—’

‘Promise.’

‘I never meant—’

‘Will you do that again if you visit me?’

‘No.’

‘What? I can’t hear you.’

I pushed the chair back and stood opposite Ellen, the crockery rattling on the table. ‘Don’t ever say that.’

Still Ellen stared. ‘Will you ever come back here and creep around my house stealing my booze?’

‘No!’ I shouted.

‘In that case let’s go for a walk.’

And I never have stolen her whisky again. Nor do I drink too much in front of her. I don’t know what Ellen did to me the day she threw me out the back door but somehow she established a benchmark in my sodden mind.

So — now I eat the wondrous meal on Friday night, eyeing the wine meanwhile. I sleep fitfully because I don’t have enough whisky or gin jumping round my blood, and then, after Saturday-morning newspapers, shared crosswords and coffee, we pull on torn, stiff, unwaxed Barbours, ill-fitting Hunter boots and walk the fields around Ellen’s house, with the ever-amenable, ankle-licking dogs trotting and sniffing behind.