‘Not today, I’m afraid,’ replies Pierre, coming down the passage towards me. ‘We have a visitor. Rose in the kitchen? She has a visitor.’

Behind Pierre comes a figure, a slim woman with brown, neat hair, tweed slouchy trousers from Toast, Cath Kidston Fair Isle tank over an immaculate, tailored white shirt. Weirdly, I suddenly realize that this is exactly what Rose would wear, if Rose ever wore trousers, that is.

I stand stock still in the middle of Rose and Pierre’s house, the lovingly restored Dairy of two of the closest (well, only) friends I have made so far after more than eighteen months in the depths of the West Country, and in walks the very woman who has put me here, and forced me away from my family home in Lonsdale Gardens, where the children were born, where I shopped and ate and moseyed around, and shopped, and gossiped, for fourteen almost entirely blissful years.

‘Clare,’ I gulp, remembering to smile. ‘Goodness. Hey there! What are you doing here?’

Rose

Poor, poor Mimi.

What a nightmare for her. And for Ralph, too. It’s been no picnic for him either, the last couple of weeks, waiting for all this to be over, as I almost said to Mimi. But when I saw Ralph, I told him I knew about it and I said that I felt for them both, and then I hugged him, experiencing for a second a rush of compassion, as if I were Princess Diana with an AIDS patient.

He hugged me back briefly but it was clear that he didn’t want to get into it. ‘Rose, thank you. It’s no one’s fault,’ he said.

According to Mimi, the reason Ralph’s been really freaked out by it all is basically work. While Mimi mooches around Home Farm, ‘a prisoner of her own endocrine system’, according to her husband, alternately weeping and keeping a stiff upper lip, Ralph is at the end of his tether with the commuting, the never seeing the children, the ‘fucking awful’ rail service, being driven totally bonkers by announcements about next station stops, by other passengers’ iPods, staying overnight in London in people’s spare rooms, living off Pret à Manger sandwiches (sandwiches that didn’t even appear to have bread in them any more – what was wrong with bread?) and then getting back to Home Farm and listening to Mimi whinge about Ana.

‘It would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,’ he said, leaving me in no doubt what ‘it’ was.