As an awful image of mass graves full of feathers and lifeless forms pumped with lead fills my mind, he goes on, ‘As for why I’m here, that’s easy, isn’t it, Max? A chap’s only ever asked shooting for one of three reasons: 1. you are a very good shot, 2. you are very grand, 3. you have a shoot.’

‘You do talk a lot of rubbish, Andrew,’ says Max. ‘I am neither grand, a good shot, nor have a shoot, as you very well know.’

‘Ah. But you’re extremely rich,’ parries Andrew. ‘As everyone knows, shooting is all about debtor-creditor relationship. To pay back people who have invited you shooting, you have to buy a day, which can cost £10,000, which is a lot to me, but nothing to you. But then, I am an excellent shot and you, as you have just admitted, are not.’ He swigs his claret as if he’d won that round – though I wasn’t clear why – and then we all have homemade shortbread with homemade, salted caramel ice-cream, and I almost faint it is so good.

And then all goes to plan – at least it does until the penultimate drive.

Pierre and Ralph are adjacent at pegs seven and eight. The baron stands on his own at peg six, his wife having taken up Cath’s offer to look around the gardens and the farm shop and load up on cheeses and sausages and a Court Place Christmas pudding to take back to France. Rose and I are leaning against a fence watching the guns and talking about sex, and the elephant trap of sex, which is that it is very tricky to resist overwhelming sexual attraction but impossible to avoid paying a heavy price for years afterwards for thoroughly enjoying illicit sex. In other words, we are very carefully not talking about my recent excursion to Godminster Hospital, as if sex and the products of conception are two entirely different things.

‘I think the point is, one feels lust so rarely at our age,’ Rose is saying, ‘and in a couple of years’ time, no one will ever want to sleep with me again, because I will be old and invisible and my breasts and everything else will have sagged. It just seems a total waste not to enjoy it while it lasts, and I can still get away with a bikini. So long as I’m discreet.’

‘Mmm,’ I answer. ‘Well, so long as Ceci’s OK and Pierre doesn’t mind too much, I suppose. But is he really OK about it? I mean, I know that you’ve been here before’ – at this point I pause, delicately, wanting Rose to know that while I was not exactly a fallen woman (I had sex exactly twice with a man who was not my husband so, in my book, I have been almost entirely faithful for fifteen years), I had some sympathy for her. I had fleetingly lapsed myself.