She glanced regretfully over her shoulder as she went down the drive, back to the barn conversion next door, where once we’d kept hay for the horses. Pity we still didn’t, I thought, as I shut the door on her.

‘Busybody,’ I muttered, going back into the sitting room. ‘She must have been listening in the garden, for crying out loud.’

‘We couldn’t do without her,’ Helena reminded me tersely, as if my parents weren’t there, or were senile, which they weren’t.

‘Oh, I disagree, I think we should do quite well,’ objected my father. ‘When a long-married couple can’t have the most basic of conjugal rights, namely a flaming row, in the privacy of their own home, things have come to a pretty pass, as that wretched nosy parker would say.’

He began picking up pieces of his bowl, not looking at either of us, and although defiant, I could see he was embarrassed.

I went to the kitchen for a dustpan and brush with Helena on my heels. ‘They’re both so pissed,’ she whispered in urgent tones as I opened the broom cupboard. ‘It has to stop.’

It didn’t occur to me to wonder how Helena would go about achieving this, because I already knew. She wanted care: twenty-four-hour care, preferably, with my parents under close watch. All booze locked away, obviously, and presumably with some sort of armed guard. Sheltered Housing were words she used a lot, before getting out brochures for an over-seventies estate in Amersham, where residents had access to a pool, a spa, restaurants – and a range of bars, I’d pointed out last time she’d shown it to me.

‘Yes, but with like-minded people who would shame them into behaving, don’t you see? Peer pressure and all that. And there’d be a warden.’

‘Like being back at school. Which they’d both hate,’ I’d told her. ‘And which they’d resist with every fibre of their being.’

‘Well, they might hate it to begin with, but they’d pretty soon get used to it.’

Again, like boarding school: the first couple of terms utter misery, but thereafter, not too bad actually. And the final years decidedly jolly as one gained seniority, which, in my parents’ case, really would be the final term. The final curtain. As I gathered the dustpan and brush from the cupboard, I wondered if she was right. My parents rattled around in this erstwhile farmhouse in leafy Buckinghamshire where Helena and I had grown up, and drank themselves to a standstill most nights. It could often end in tears, admittedly, but no bloodshed or genuine fisticuffs had occurred yet, and but for the noise of smashing china, was it really anyone’s business what they did with their own property if no one got hurt in the process?