He sinks to a chair. I note that it is a mahogany armchair, with a carved top rail and cross bar and reeded scroll arms. And like everything else in Godminster Hall, it is fine and inherited, with a history as long as your arm.

‘Please help me, Rose, you’re the only one he listens to. My life won’t be worth living. It’s jolly difficult, what with two sets of children out of two different mothers and just the one estate to hand round.’ He says this without any apparent irony.

‘I’m sure it is,’ I say, in a slightly pointed way, designed to remind Ned that many people would wish they had his problems and that Ned had made his own bed. My voice also carries the whiff of my plight: I am – as I often complain to people –the main breadwinner, as Pierre is not good at bringing home the bacon, and we are living off the capital of the sale of our London house in Barnes, not income, and the capital in question is running out fast. ‘So, let me get this straight,’ I say, wondering if Ned is ever going to offer me tea. Or better, a drink. ‘You want me to persuade your eldest son to waive his rights to the estate and sign them over to Lulu’s son, Ned. Despite the fact that the place is entailed.’

‘Well, it’s a thought,’ Ned says. ‘Even if it’s not strictly doing things by the Bryanston book.’

‘You are clearly worried that your heir, Jesse Marlon, whom Lulu doesn’t know stands to inherit rather than her own son, might, despite being deeply unmaterialistic at the moment, at some point in the future change his mind, as all lefties do in the end, and decide he does want all this after all.’ My wave encompasses the haunted study, with its stain on the floor, its panelled windowseats and walls, the moulded overmantle on the heraldic chimney, the Reynoldses on the walls, the terrace and walled garden and landscaped grounds, the woods and the lake and even the smudge on the horizon that is the Lar valley containing Jesse Marlon’s abode of Spodden’s Hatch. ‘And if he does decide that, after all, he can squeeze Godminster Hall into his life after you die, Lulu will never sleep with you, ever, again? Right?’

Ned nods dumbly. ‘If Ned’s not going to inherit the house eventually, and I don’t have any money, there’s nothing in it for her. She’ll divorce me,’ he says, ‘and go back to London, where she’s always wanted to be. You don’t know what she’s like.’