The cheering sight of Maddocks appears in the doorway. The butler gives a minute nod to our chatelaine. ‘Lunch,’ announces Cath, rising in a swift movement from the sofa. ‘It’s a buffay, I’m afraid.’

Lunch is served in the panelled cuboid dining room, where the sun, which has come out now we are inside, sparkles on the polished crystal and carafes and silver and the sconces glowing with lit candles.

I am seated between a little financier called Max something and Andrew, sadly not next to the baron, but no sooner had I sat down than I have to get up again to help myself at the sideboard, where sliced bœuf en croûte stuffed with foie gras is squired by a julienne of seasonal vegetables, celeriac mash, buttered spinach, and carrots sprinkled with caraway seeds, i.e. enough to feed an army after a long march.

So then I flirt away with Andrew Lewis, while keeping an eye on Rose, who is flirting with the baron and Ralph.

Pierre is standing sturdily by with a plate, waiting to do full justice to the spread, and talking to Granville, who as host is bringing up the rear, and asking Pierre about Pierre’s work… as if he’s really interested, too.

Well, I say ‘flirt’, but every time I try, the former editor seems more interested in the man on my left, a tiny little tycoon, a pocket plutocrat – Max somebody – with small, pudgy hands and curly hair, whose private equity company, Vobiscum, has apparently many billions ‘under management’, whatever that means, and whose ‘carry’, whatever that means, runs into hundreds of millions.

I gaze on with interest. While we can see all too clearly all that nurses and teachers do to earn their pittance, no one has yet adequately explained why men who work in finance get paid many millions a year simply for shunting other people’s money around. And when you meet these men, it invariably becomes no clearer why they deserve to earn a thousand times more a year than nurses, either.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, Max,’ says Andrew to this grubby little moneybags, ‘I think you paid at least a hundred too much for that newspaper group.’

At this lèse-majesté, Max turns slightly purple and grabs the carafe of wine sitting on a snowy cloth in the middle of the table by its slender neck and pours himself a full glass, right up to the brim, as if only this action will prevent him from physically ripping Andrew’s throat out with his bare hands. A purple stain spreads over the white cloth as he replaces it, and I feel horrified, but this little accident is beneath both men’s notice, on the grounds that a linen tablecloth has been stained but someone will be paid to deal with it.