She unlocked the door, using her shoulder at just the right moment to free the hall rug, and remembered Peter’s amazement at her virgin state.

‘Do you mean –’ he’d rolled over on that huge bed amid at all those creamy lace pillows and widened his choirboy eyes ‘– that this is the first, the only, time you’ve been to bed with anyone?’

And she’d tried to explain, wrapping herself in the flimsy sheet, embarrassed then by her nakedness, that yes, it was. Oh, there had been several early fumbling and groping attempts at parties, and for a time at university she’d gone out with a history student with a car and her legs had been covered in door-handle bruises as she’d wriggled away from his ardour. But she had never made love with anyone, simply because she had never been in love.

‘Maddy …’ He’d always said her name like a caress. ‘You don’t have to be in love, darling. Not these days. If you want it, grab it.’

It had been difficult, curled against him on the bed in the hotel room with her striped cleaners’ overall discarded on the floor, trying to explain that she didn’t think like that. Old fashioned as it may be, making love had to be just that. A physical act to express pure and deep emotion. That she couldn’t just leap into bed with anybody; she had to be in love.

She slammed the cottage door and padded into the kitchen to make coffee. Now Peter was back, and obviously planning to make his home once more in Milton St John. She bit into a Mars bar that Suzy had left on the draining board. After last night she knew she could cope with Peter in the village. She had at last outgrown him.

Maddy sighed. Of course, a new man in her life would be nice … as a friend, a partner, a lover in the proper sense; but she was pretty sure that sort of man didn’t exist outside the covers of romantic novels. She wasn’t going to find a Heathcliff, a Rhett Butler, or even a Mr Rochester in Milton St John.

She looked down at her hands in horror. She had demolished the entire Mars bar without tasting it. She’d be talking to herself next. Scrabbling the wrapper into a guilty ball, she sloshed hot water on to the coffee granules in her mug and headed for the rubbish bin.

Because the cottage had such a peculiar design, the kitchen was in three parts – a tiny square bit with a sink and cooker and three cupboards, leading to a long narrow bit with a table and chairs and an ancient refrigerator. This then turned a right-angled corner into what had at one time been the scullery, and now housed the washing machine, tumble dryer, and the bad-tempered boiler.

She had rented the cottage from Diana when she first came to Milton St John. That had been one of her few wise moves in those early days. Peter had had a flat in the High Street, and on those heady afternoons in his hotel room when they’d first met, he’d begged her to come and live with him. Maddy, hopelessly in love, had desperately wanted to be close to him but had had some sixth sense warning to remain independent.