We went in Mimi’s defiantly unvaleted Subaru, having shoved everything on the back seats – Lakeland catalogues, cartons of juice, sweet wrappers – into the footwells at her request. ‘Why go in comfort in three cars,’ cries Mimi, as she hurtles round blind corners in narrow lanes, and we all shriek girlishly as we are thrown together, ‘when we can all cram into one filthy one?’

After we’d signed paperwork (I notice that the management now not only demand information about allergies and operations but plastic surgery too) we all went into different cubicles. Mimi went off to be ‘deforested’, which I think meant a leg wax, and for a lash tint, while Lulu was booked in for eyebrow-shaping and a Vitamin C facial. I had booked in for collagen eye treatment, a hydrating facial and a fruit acid pedicure.

At lunchtime we meet by prearrangement in the relaxation room at the Haybarn, and we’re sitting in brief towels, dimpled and hot like human dim sum, as we’ve been steaming. I am remembering with a sort of voluptuous shiver the last time, in the sauna, with Virginie, the time that I realized… who I really was. ‘It’s such a relief actually,’ I say, banishing this thought, as I sink back on to the lovely white towelling cushions on the slatted loungers, and arrange the pillow thing behind my neck so I can relax totally.

It’s nice. I can look a whole day of pampering in the face. Especially now I have some money to splash around again, at last.

‘I realize, now, that I love Pierre very deeply. It’s a real challenge – it’s been a real challenge I mean – living in rural isolation with a man who’s more interested in flints than his family, so I think I was reacting to that, a little. In the past.’

It’s true. I have accepted that Pierre’s decision not to pitch in, not to help around the house, something I’ve complained about since our honeymoon, was a cry for help. What he was expressing was, I think, not an inherent laziness that went with his artistic temperament (and his high tolerance, it has to be admitted, for mess) but his own private rebellion against my domestic hegemony.

It is all clear to me now.

There is water with lemon and mint and black things in a jug on the table, together with all this month’s magazines – Vogue, Vanity Fair, Tatler, Harper’s. I pour myself a glass, and instruct the others to have lots of it, because the charcoal in the water is supposed to balance the pH, or something, in the system. The people who run the Brambletye started out in San Francisco, and it shows.