She drove slowly as she always did, as every resident of the village did, knowing its horsy population and being aware that each rounded bend might reveal a glossy string of racehorses worth a king’s ransom. Not a confident driver, Maddy used the car only for sorties such as these within the village, where a safe thirty miles an hour was speed of Schumacher proportions. For journeys farther afield she relied on the good local minibus service, or caught the train at Didcot.

Peter had laughed at her when she’d tried to explain to him how flustered she got by incomprehensible road signs and the aggressive roar of the motorway. ‘You’re an anachronism, Maddy. You don’t like fast traffic, you don’t know how to work the video – you don’t even completely understand the microwave, for goodness sake.’ His caressing voice had taken the barb from the words. He’d made it sound like a compliment rather than a criticism. ‘You’d have been much happier in the fifties than the noughties. You really will have to drag yourself into the present, love. You’ll never survive waging a one-lady war against progress.’

She turned the car into the tunnel of lilac trees that heralded Diana and Gareth James-Jordan’s training stables, remembering with painful clarity how she had tried to protest that she was really quite content with the present, merely finding technology rather difficult to understand, and Peter had smothered the explanation with his lips and his arms, and told her that he loved her anyway – and always would. And she, gullible fool that she was, had melted in delight. Then he left her.

And now he was back.

‘Maddy! Angel! You look gorgeous.’ Diana opened the door herself, which was encouraging. It signified that this really might be “just a little get-together before the season takes hold and we’re all too busy, darling”, as Diana had said when she’d issued her invitation.

As she clashed cheeks with her hostess Maddy was overcome by a waft of Chanel’s finest. ‘Diana …’ The greeting ritual was complete.

She followed Diana into the hall, where walnut and rosewood gleamed, and parquet flooring looked as though it was about to hold a skating spectacular.

‘You do look lovely, Maddy,’ Diana cooed over her shoulder. ‘New top?’

‘Yes.’ Well, it was. To her. And Suzy had only had it a month or so.

Diana, of course, was groomed and curry-combed to parade ring perfection. Everything sleek and stark and shining. Was there really no other woman in the whole of Milton St John, Maddy wondered, who battled with plump thighs and a chest that always threatened to explode from its confines? Just because it was a racing community where the horses were slender and tight muscled, and the majority of the men were, by necessity, the same, surely not every woman had to be honed to near-anorexia? Even Kimberley Weston, Milton St John’s token female trainer, who had to be at least a size eighteen, managed to look as though it was all solid flesh with not a wobble or wrinkle in sight.