“How can I refuse,” I said. “And it does sound a lot better than baked beans.”

The taxi now whisked us in the direction of Chelsea and stopped outside a pretty little blue and white shuttered house. “Here we are,” he said.

Darcy opened the front door and ushered me through to a tiny living room. No heads or shields on the walls, no portraits of ancestors, just a couple of good modern paintings and comfortable sofas. This is how ordinary people live, I thought with a pang of envy, and I pictured myself living in a house like this with Darcy, doing the cooking and cleaning myself, and . . .

“Give me a second to go and change,” he said. “If you want to rinse out those wet clothes there’s a sink in the scullery.”

Thanks to living alone at Rannoch House, I now knew where a scullery was to be found and went through a small, neat kitchen to the room beyond. Here I ran the sink full of water (hot water, oh, the bliss of it; I almost jumped in with the clothes) and plunged the clothes into it. When they came out, I did notice that the white skirt had now become light blue, but hoped it might go away when the garment dried. I opened the door to find a place to hang them and found myself beside the Thames. I was in a small, pretty garden with a tiny lawn and a tree that had just burst into leaf. Beyond was a jetty. I stood there entranced until I was found by Darcy.

“Now you’ve seen how the plebs live,” he said. “Not bad, eh?”

“It’s lovely,” I said, “but didn’t you say you were borrowing it?”

“Absolutely. I can’t afford this kind of place. It belongs to a distant cousin of mine who chooses to spend his summers on the Med in his yacht. Fortunately I have cousins all over Europe, thanks to the Catholics’ view on birth control. Stay here and I’ll bring out the wine and whatever food I can rustle up.”

Soon we were sitting on deck chairs in that little garden with cold white wine, ripe cheeses, crusty bread, and grapes. It was a warm evening and the setting sun glowed on the old brick of the walls. For a while I ate and drank in silence.

“This is heaven,” I said. “Hooray for all your cousins.”

“Speaking of cousins,” Darcy said, “I gather that poor old Hubert Anstruther is not expected to last much longer. In a coma, so they say.”

“Do you know him?”

“Went climbing a couple of times with him in the Alps. Didn’t strike me as the kind of fellow that would let himself be swept away by an avalanche.”

“Tristram is devastated,” I said. “Sir Hubert was his guardian, you know.”

“Hmph,” was all he said to this.