‘Oh Lord, yes. Even your mother does, and she doesn’t mind at all.’

Hence her skippy excitement. A saucy afternoon with flirty Bertie and without her flinty-eyed daughter watching her flutter her eyelids and chuck it down her neck.

‘But we’ll ask the Ashleys with them,’ Dad said decisively and I saw Mum’s face drop. ‘Joan missed her vocation as a Lieutenant Colonel and keeps us all in check, but we suffer her for Roger.’

‘Love Roger,’ agreed Mum, brightening again and bustling to get a fish pie I’d made out of the fridge, whilst my father hastened as much as he could on his much improved, but still healing legs, to open the cellar door in the hall. But I strode past him.

‘One case or two?’ I asked meaningfully, eyeing him beadily at the top of the horrifically steep stone steps he was planning to descend. Mum had quietly admitted that he’d fallen down the last few once, and it was on that basis that I’d banned it, planning to move a selection of cases up to the scullery. In fact I’d planned to do that today.

‘Oh no, darling, just a couple of bottles of the Merlot, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, chastened. And then when I was down there: ‘Actually, make it three? And a bottle of the Yquem, perhaps?’

I brought them up and put them on the side in the kitchen. ‘Just make sure she eats,’ I said, eyeing my mother, in full earshot.

‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ she trilled happily, fluttering to open the napkin drawer.

‘No, the impossible teenager,’ I said grimly, getting a trifle out of the freezer to defrost, and then leaving them to it, off to embark on my own, far less enviable day.

As I beetled up the M4, I checked my face again. My mouth seemed to have all but disappeared, and I wished with all my heart I was with my irresponsible, kind parents, doling out fish pie to my mother, keeping an eye on Dad as he tottered to the fridge – now that his legs were healing he refused to use his stick – and staying in that warm, nest-like excuse of a life, forever.