I squint over my fruity drink to the pool. It’s not an infinity pool – nothing so vulgar – but the old-fashioned blue rectangle, because it was put in in the fifties, so the Huttons could keep up with Noel Coward, up on the green hill, at Firefly. I sniff deeply, as if trying to imbibe the warm air laden with sweet musty scents, just as intoxicating as any rum.

Outside the back door, a lovingly maintained Ford Falcon with weathered leather red seats and chrome trimmings is not there. The ‘boys’ – as we have taken to calling our husbands – are off on a jaunt. When he first saw it, Ralph said it made him long for the days when cars had wings and sanitary pads didn’t, or if pads did have wings, it wasn’t something that the manufacturers felt obliged to point out on television to the viewing public every five minutes.

‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ I say, still luxuriating after three days of indolence so profound that it can take me all morning to stir from my lounger to fetch my reading matter – the new July Cooper – from my bedroom, with its four-poster and tiled bathroom, and heart-catching view of azure sea. ‘I have to say, it does make up for things a bit.’ I think warm thoughts towards mine host.

After I’d fainted into his lap, Sir Michael definitely rose to the occasion. He turned out to be one of those men who was simply impossible when tiny things went wrong, such as when the keeper brought the Range Rover instead of the Land Rover to the meet, or the butler laid out the wrong tie, or someone spilt their claret – but second to none in a major crisis.

Basically, what happened was this, I think.

Sir Michael bearded Granville. Granville filled him in on the salient details. Rose confessed that she had shared with Granville ‘almost everything’ on the ski holiday, though I did not have the energy to see how many issues they covered: the origins of our exit from Notting Hill, the causes of Clare’s mysterious presentations in Honeyborne, my day trip to Godminster… I mean, my life recently has been more complicated than the Peloponnesian War, to the extent that even I can hardly keep up with what’s been going on, let alone understand it.