‘But how?’ I said, fascinated. Even though I felt like shit, and was considering hurling myself into the Lar, like a Labrador whose very blood calls for repeated immersion in freezing waters, Ralph’s rare piece of actual news about people I actually knew had prodded me back to my usual self. And the fact that Giddy knew about Joe’s paternity all along definitely qualified as a choice nugget.

‘Gideon can’t have children,’ said Ralph. ‘He just never told Clare, let Clare think she was infertile, for years, let her think that his seed was, as it were, falling on stony ground. So when Clare got pregnant, the first time, in around October, but lost it a few weeks later –’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘Well, Gideon of course knew then that someone else must have made Clare pregnant, because it wasn’t him.’

‘OK,’ I interrupted. ‘I see. What a shit. Did he have a vasectomy, or something?’

Ralph made a distressed noise. This was his signal to me that this was simply not the sort of question one chap would ever ask another, let alone a chap’s wife. It was like asking another chap whether he’d ever slept with someone. Not done. If you asked, and you were answered, then you knew. And then, someone else might ask you, and instead of answering, honestly, that you didn’t have the faintest idea, you might have to say something. You might even have to lie. So that was why chaps, on the whole, sensibly didn’t talk about these things. It was a form of self-defence.

‘So Gideon knows that Joe’s not his, fine. But does he know Joe is yours? Is that why Clare is in Honeyborne all the time?’ I asked in a low, controlled voice. ‘What does she want from us?’

‘Erm,’ said Ralph, looking out of the window, as if hoping that rescue might come in the shape of a passing fisherman, in search of a woolly bugger, or any other sort of fly. ‘Well, here’s the bad news…’ He gazed intently at a spot on the Lar, as if that spot was the lair of a large and evasive trout. ‘She was quite keen for me to, er,’ he looked at his feet. Ashamed, as well he might be. After what he put me through. My husband has impregnated my former best friend seemingly in return for me having sex twice with a completely irresistible (to me, anyway) single billionaire who’d made a pass at me just when I’d got my figure back (seven years after having Posy, which may sound a lot but is actually my landspeed record on regaining pre-pregnancy bodyweight).