‘I’ve no idea. And to be honest, I haven’t had the nerve to ask. I see quite a lot of Christianne, and I’m sure she’ll get round to telling me one day, but even so I think it’s maybe best to let her make the running. This is a very unusual place, my lovely. I’m sure people here are as nosey as anywhere else, but what everyone’s got is time. There’s a way of doing things, a code if you like. You don’t push, you take your place in the queue. It’s de rigueur in the bakery, and it’s the same in conversation. It matters to be patient, to wait your turn, and after a while it becomes rather delightful. I hate to say it, but on reflection London’s full of barbarians, even dear old Holland Park. Shove, shove, shove. Yatter, yatter, yatter. Life in your face all the time. How did my neighbour lose his leg? How did he acquire all those scars on his face? I’ve no idea, but what’s certain is that one day someone will tell me.’

‘Comportement,’ I murmur. ‘That’s what we call it in French.’

‘Exactement.’

‘Exactement?’ To my knowledge, Evelyn doesn’t speak French.

‘Mais oui.’ She’s laughing. ‘I’ve joined the Anglo-French Fellowship. We meet once a month in the Masonic Hall, another one of Budleigh’s little surprises. Everything in French. Best behaviour. L’importance du comportement. Christianne’s fault, not mine.’

Much later, a little drunk, I help serve supper. Evelyn has always been a sort of mother to me, a wise neighbour with unlimited patience and an uncanny ability to unravel the endless tangles – both personal and professional – I laid at her feet. She’s a small woman, neat, self-contained, unfussy, easy to underestimate at first sight, but a conversation with any of her stable of writers tells a very different story. All of them talk about her editorial judgement, of how acutely she’s tuned into the flow and cadence of real conversation, of the nose she has for the faintest bum note in a descriptive paragraph, or a passage of dialogue, and how she can transform a novel’s prospects – both commercially and in every other sense – with a bold narrative suggestion, an artful feint that wouldn’t have been out of place on a battlefield. One bestselling scribe, impossible to miss at any airport bookstore, once described her as the General Patton among a dying breed of editors. And he meant it as a compliment.