Elpie and her husband, whom we all very much liked, were drowned in what the French call, rightly, a ‘banal’ little sailing accident off Chichester, and Dad never recovered. He’d retired by then, happy pottering about in his vegetable garden, or nailing things together in his little workshed. But Elpie’s death hit him hard. Mother went to call him in for tea one afternoon and found him lying on his workshed floor. He went quickly and without fuss, and that was that. Mother didn’t wait much longer, she just slowly died before our eyes, James’s and mine … I was at home quite a lot now, to support her somehow. But that wasn’t enough, so it was, all in all, a bloody year. James went back to France after everything was over: I got the house and contents, he got a legacy of some size, not much, but enough to keep him under a roof and in paints. And independent of me.

I sold the house at Faringdon for a fair price and moved up to London to work. There was no point in hanging about a place which had been so filled with love and emotions of various kinds, so I quit. Clean break, as they say.

I didn’t get married; for some reason I was inhibited, I think. Inhibited by the destruction of our family, so although there were ladies about and often, it never came to more than ‘long holidays’, or little affairs which loitered on and finally fizzled out. I wasn’t in the business for permanence.

And then I met Helen.

And here I was, presently, wondering what the hell had happened to us all, and how two families could fall apart, even in such very different ways, and end up so abysmally destroyed.

I’d married too late, that was certain; I had little patience really for the finer points of love and affection. The physical side was okay – managed that very well, I was often told – but, somehow, I didn’t want responsibility.

Who was it who said, very vulgarly, ‘Why buy a cow when the milk is so cheap?’ I don’t know. I deplore it, of course, but it made me laugh – once. Can’t crack a smile up here today. But perhaps I’d have been better off – everyone would have been – if I had heeded the disgusting remark. Now there were Annie and Giles: responsibilities for life. Helen would manage, I was pretty certain about that. She wouldn’t stay a divorced lady for long, not the type … but getting back into the wretched television business wouldn’t be that easy. She had been right when she said that the ‘bitches in Harper’s and the Tatler’ would have taken her place: she was not young enough now, her ideas had probably atrophied, she still possibly thought, and worked, as she had fourteen years ago. And fourteen years in commercial TV is a lifetime.