‘… What can we do?’ he finishes for her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says miserably again.

‘It’s not your fault, Elizabeth. If there’s one thing I learnt from the war, it’s that there are some battles you can’t win – and they’re always the ones you’re fighting on your own side.’ He stretches his arms above his head. ‘Well, it looks as if I’ll be needing the Thursday Club even more.’

‘The Thursday Club?’

‘I’m a founder member,’ he tells her. ‘It’s a stag club. Just fifty or so chaps, and a place we can let off steam.’

Philip remembers how Baron Nahum had sold it to him. ‘You’re going to have to have some kind of private life that isn’t controlled by the palace,’ he’d said. ‘Let’s set up a club with just a few trusted friends. Somewhere we can meet, tell bawdy jokes without anyone calling for the smelling salts, play games, dine, drink … do everything you’d like to do in your own home if you weren’t afraid of what your wife would say.’

‘So no women?’

‘Waitresses only,’ Baron promised. ‘All sworn to secrecy, naturally. And best of all from your point of view, no protocol.’

‘What does “letting off steam” mean exactly?’ Elizabeth asks dubiously.

‘It’s just lunch,’ Philip backtracks a little. ‘We meet each week in the top room of Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. There’s a set price for lunch, wines, and vintage port. Very civilised. But we’re all equals once we’re there. I’m just Philip at the Thursday Club. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is.’

He’s not sure Elizabeth is entirely convinced but the Thursday Club is one part of his life he’s not prepared to give up. He’s juggling his work at Corsham with an increasing number of private engagements and instead of making himself comfortable at Chester Street he has to make his London home at Kensington Palace with his grandmother. There are constant rows about the wedding arrangements and who is going to pay for what, endless starchy discussions about how he should or shouldn’t behave in any given circumstance.

The only place Philip can really relax now is with his friends at the Thursday Club and he looks forward to it with disproportionate pleasure. Walking in, meeting smiles instead of pursed lips, discarding his cloak of ‘prospective husband of the heir to the throne’ at the door … Who can put a price on that? Philip wonders. There is an unwritten code that nothing that goes on in the Thursday Club is ever discussed elsewhere. He is not the only member with a public profile who is glad of a reprieve from constantly having to watch his words. He defers to nobody, and nobody defers to him. The food is unpretentious and the décor even more so, although there is a cuckoo clock above the mantelpiece that provides endless amusement.

Perhaps some of the humour is a little schoolboyish but God, it’s a relief just to have some fun for a change. Nor does he have to watch how much he smokes or drinks, although at times, he admits, this can lead to revealing more than he cares to normally.