‘Sorry, Ned, to interrupt again,’ I say, ‘but you haven’t explained where I fit in.’ I may have enjoyed – more than I can say – my hours with Jesse Marlon, but the last thing I need is to be roped into some estate-planning quagmire of the Bryanston family. Frankly, with a husband, a hormonal daughter, a hot ex-lover and an even hotter new lover, I am feeling pretty over-extended already, like the British army when it opened up a new front in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.

‘Look, what you get up to in your own marriage, even if it involves my own son, is thankfully none of my business. But it would help me out of a terrible hole if you would help to persuade him to maintain the status quo,’ Ned groans.

‘What is the status quo, though?’

‘Lulu thinks that Little Ned stands to inherit, because he is called Little Ned and I’m called Big Ned. It’s too long and boring to explain but the first Bryanston son and heir, so to speak, is always called Ned, it’s a family custom, so she assumed as I did, frankly, that that would be all right.’

‘But Ned isn’t the first Bryanston son,’ I point out, ‘Jesse Marlon is. And he’s called Jesse Marlon, not Ned,’ I add unnecessarily.

‘I know, I know, but Jude, my first wife, Jesse Marlon’s mother, didn’t believe in primogeniture, so she wouldn’t go along with it,’ he says, ‘the Little-Ned-Big-Ned custom. It just didn’t seem like… an issue twenty years ago or whatever it was, when we were young and groovy and counterculture.’

‘But why is it an issue now, then?’ I give Ned my intelligent look.

‘I’ve, ah, never dared tell her, as in Lulu, of course, that the whole Godminster estate is entailed. Every time I was going to broach the subject, I bottled. It’s all my fault. And now the lawyers have just confirmed that I can’t hand it to Little Ned even if I wanted to. And I’ve tried the National Trust, believe me – I mean, the place has been in our family for hundreds of years, it’s got all the furniture and tapestries, and pictures, and china, the pastry larder, the game larder, it’s got the lot – but the Trust said, “Only if it would be a,” quote unquote, “catastrophe for the nation” if it were snapped up by a ring-tone king who wanted to tear it down and put in an underground car park, or ozone pool or something equally frightful. The Trust couldn’t have been less interested. So it’s Jesse Marlon’s to bloody give away.’