She looked down into his face and shook her head. ‘How would I know? I’m hardly an expert on love and relationships, am I? Is this why you brought me up here? To discover if you could make me a bit on the side?’

‘Jesus!’ Angrily, Drew swung himself on to Dock of the Bay’s back. ‘If I’d wanted to do that, I’d have done it a long time ago.’

Would you? She thought, as Solomon started his rolling walk back along the gallops. Or was Caroline right, and was Drew merely contented with flirting and kissing? And if so, where did affairs start? Did you have to actually make love to be having an affair, or was being in love equally immoral? If so, she realised, she was already an adulteress.

Drew had overtaken her and was tugging off Dock of the Bay’s tack when she rode into Peapods’ yard. He’d pulled off the crash hat and his dark hair was plastered to his forehead. ‘I’ll see to Solomon as well. Just leave him. I’ll sponge them both and see to the rugs.’

He was bitingly angry. She closed her eyes and cursed herself. She wanted to recapture the laughing friendly flirtatiousness. If only it could stop at that – for both of them.

‘I might as well do the cleaning while I’m here.’ She dragged off the hat and shook her curls free. ‘Where did Jackie put the stuff?’

‘Cupboard under the stairs. You don’t have to –’

‘Of course I have to. It’s what I’m paid for. By your wife.’

She turned on her heel and practically ran underneath the clock arch towards the house. Their relationship was like a seesaw – with far more downs than ups. And it was probably permanently down now.

She pulled the cleaning paraphernalia out from the cupboard and had a sudden vision of herself as a lonely, lumpy child. She’d been eight or nine, before Suzy was born, and her parents had taken her on holiday to a small village on the Norfolk coast. It had been a grey and blustery week and they were sheltering in a recreation ground. She’d sat on one end of a wooden seesaw in her shorts and blazer, her legs purpling in the wind, while her parents took turns to push down the other end. Eventually, both of them tired of the game and left her sitting there, firmly anchored to the tarmac, tears streaming down her cheeks.

That was how it was now, she thought, blinking back grown-up tears, as she bumped the vacuum cleaner up Peapods’ exquisite staircase. And how it was probably always going to be. She’d insulted him once too often. He really had been furious. She, Maddy Beckett, who would never knowingly hurt anyone, had hurt the man who least deserved it.