‘And what about the baby, the boy,’ I went on. ‘What on earth can Gideon think? Suddenly, his wife insists on buying your house. Suddenly, his wife gets pregnant after ten years of trying, and you disappear to Dorset with two millions pounds of her money – well, one million, not that it went very far in the end – and then, oops! there’s a baby who looks exactly like you and Casimir. He looks so like Cas did at that age. Those ringlets! It’s all a bit, well, iffy, isn’t it?’ I felt a terrible sadness. ‘If he was very short and covered with a thick black pelt, like a caveman, it wouldn’t really matter so much, but how on earth is Clare going to pass him off as Gideon’s? And if you were so OK about having another child–’ I went on, coldly, my dry eyes boring into his ’ – why did you want me to get rid of ours?’

Ralph stared at me, levelly, which was brave. Lesser men than Ralph would have quailed before my gaze.

There was a long pause. Ralph looked out at the peaty river, at the pools and eddies, the wet backs of round stones on the bank, the dappling evening light, at the trees moving in the evening breeze, as if at old friends. He unfolded himself from the chair, and went to the window, as if to spy a pike in a pool, or to ascertain the location of a wild trout from a bubble on the river’s surface, or a special stone in a dark place.

He stared at me.

I was sitting very still, wearing my Venetian picnic outfit of a smocky peasant top and a tiered skirt, with bare legs and espadrilles, over which I had flung Cas’s anorak. My face felt dirty and smeared with tears and cake.

Ralph came and stood behind my chair, and started kissing my neck, and whispering to me.

I tried to resist. After a time, I yielded.

We repaired to a sofa with the stuffing coming out which was in a dark corner, underneath a watercolour of Queen Victoria foul-hooking a trout.

‘Lie down,’ Ralph ordered, pulling off his jersey, and Harvie and Hudson blue double-cuffed shirt and covered my round, protuberant body with his lean flat one. I wriggled out of my clothes, but left my skirt on just in case a ghillie chose to replenish his fly-box at the moment of crisis and I needed to flip it down fast.

‘Ralph,’ I panted, as the sofa juddered and I felt I must tell him before I lost the power of speech and was carried away like a leaf on the rills and eddies of the Lar, burbling and chattering away outside. ‘Ralph, there’s something you need to know,’ I whispered urgently, even though telling him would have interrupted this rare spontaneous moment of unbridled passion between man and wife.