Kimberly likes a dry Martini and she prepares one for each of them. Compared with Mulgrave House, Kimberly’s house in Notting Hill is modest, even spare. Mulgrave, impeccable in every way, is huge, and, with amounts of pictures, classical artefacts, tapestries and books, looks less like a house than a museum. Here, backing on to Ladbroke Square, all is light and airy and contemporary. Kimberly and Julian collect modern pictures and modern furniture. Kimberly has two huge canvases by Andrew Wyeth in the living room. One is of a lighthouse and one of a barn in the snow. She sips her Martini, which has an extraterrestrial glow.

‘God, Kim, that’s strong.’

‘You know what Homer Simpson said about the barman: “He knows just how I like my Martinis, full of alcohol.” By the way you look great and so-oh happy.’

‘It’s the alcohol. In a few moments I’ll be singing.’

‘Oh hell, no, we better go. One for the road?’

‘Why not?’

A little drunk they enter the restaurant conspiratorially as if they know something amusing not revealed to anyone else. They sit down at a low black table. Kimberly’s skirt is halfway up her thighs. She has great thighs because she comes from the sporting New England clan of the Fitzhughs, related in some way to the Kennedys. They all look fantastically, aggressively healthy, until they die young. Her face is not exactly beautiful, but it is engaging, with memorable, strong tomboy features, and an Irish broadness between the eyes and the cheeks, which must have been a Darwinian thing, an adaptation to the coastal winds off the Irish Sea. At the same time, Kim is unmistakably American. How is it that from a huge, polyglot nation you can almost always pick out an American face in Europe? Kim makes her feel a little limp and flabby, but then Morné is working on that problem. Her glutes, apparently located right in the middle of each lobe of the bottom, are hurting. Fusion food, ordered by Kim, arrives on black plates – little parcels of this and that accompanied by very thin slivers of Oriental vegetables or perhaps fruit, and emblematic parts of tasty creatures – a crab, a sea urchin, a lobster, a pigeon – decorate each plate. It looks like an elegant cemetery of tiny animals.

Kimberly is talking to some young man she knows, who has sidled up in that tousled, oh-gosh-what-a-surprise-to-see-you way, Chelsea boots (back in fashion), jeans turned up, striped shirt and a jacket. These chaps always wear a shirt and a jacket in restaurants. T-shirts are for the underclass or for children.

‘Fleur, meet Sebastian, a friend of Julian’s – and mine, of course. Sebastian, meet Fleur, my mother-in-law.’

‘Mother-in-law? I wish I had a mother-in-law like you.’

‘I think it’s kinda cool to have such a lovely mother-in-law,’ says Kim.