All this is, I think, because on Ralph’s side of the family, several psychopathic or otherwise certifiable uncles and cousins (only referred to, with grim expressions, as ‘poor’ Uncle Fergus/Jonty/Kit by the few surviving members of the Fleming clan) have managed to shoot themselves in the head while either cleaning guns or climbing over stiles.

After hearing about several of these unfortunate male relations, I asked Ralph whether clumsiness ran in the Fleming family. He looked at me with surprise, and then with reluctance explained that they had all blown their brains out but, in English or Scottish families, this act is only ever referred to, if at all, as a ‘tragic accident’, with the strong implication that the poor soul was a silly whose main fault was not taking his own life but committing the much more inexcusable crime of not playing up and playing the game.

After the fourth drive, the beaters disappear into a barn for beef stew and beer, roll-ups suddenly appearing between their lips, and we bounce back to the house, with spirits aloft at what lies ahead.

As I remove my hiking boots in the boot room, surrounded by Barbours and wellies in orderly rows and fishes in mounted glass cases, house and team pictures of Granville at Harrow, young and fresh and limber in rugby kit and house colours and tails, I too am looking forward to a greedy lunch, but I also have that tugging, bitter-sweet feeling. There’s something about being in a well-oiled, smooth-running English country house in the middle of the shooting season that always fleetingly fills me with, I now realize, a sort of lust: the lust to have the sort of money to live and to entertain on this grand scale. I’m not proud of it, but there we go.

It’s not so much the huge drawing room, the bedrooms, the vast warm kitchen with four-oven Aga, the polished stone floor, the echoing hall, the billiard room, I envy: it’s the game larder and dairy, the laundry room and the gun room and the boot room and the silver safe and the gents’, the little rooms that provide the graceful flow and articulation to life, where everything is in its place, and always has been.

Whenever I voice this disgruntlement, Rose pulls me up sharply and says, ‘Cath may have a house, but you have a Home,’ as if I have little samplers embroidered with pieties hung up above fireplaces and gingham bonnets over my jam pots, and furniture gleaming with beeswax, which is, I regret to say, not accurate.