At which point Biddy looks, if possible, even fiercer than usual. Her eyes are gleaming, and her blood is up. I see – though I hate to admit it – that she is a fine-looking woman. She never misses a day out with either the foxhounds or the staghounds, which means she is on horseback or behind a trailer pretty much continuously, what with Pony Club and having two children who ride, and all the hacking and cubbing and hunting and point-to-points on a daily basis.

‘Joddies off!’ I can hear her cry now at the gates of Honeyborne First School. She used to clatter up with a muddy-looking Flavia and little Harry – barely out of nappies – in the car. ‘Unies on! Come on, Flaves! Hurry up, Harry! Spit spot!’ Biddy was, of course, turned out in hunting rig, right down to a white stock and mud-spattered haunches, having already taken her five- and seven-year-old cubbing for a couple of hours, whereas the rest of us had barely crawled out from our bedclothes. Henry is also almost continuously on horseback, apart from when he is taking outside rides, which I used to find terribly attractive. It was something about the straddling and the sweating, not to mention the gleaming cavalry-officer boots and his buttocks in jodhpurs. Anyway, I just had to have him. And I did.

He came round, one morning, when Pierre was in the studio.

I opened the door and he was just showered, just shaved and wearing a blazer, and looked like a prep school boy ready to read the lesson on Sunday. I almost shut the door. I realized –but too late – that I only found him attractive when he was mounted, with a sheen up. Henry had the bit between his teeth, though, and said I had been asking for it, and now it was time for my ‘daily service’, and he hoped I was ready, and that he didn’t see why that slacker Pierre should enjoy ‘sole grazing rights’ over me, whatever that meant. So I went through with it, with eyes closed, trying to pretend we were lying on bracken in a cleeve, while the hounds scurried and yapped about us, and our horses munched on sweet Dorset grass, rather than in my cloudy white bed… and then, to my surprise and Henry’s satisfaction, I came like the proverbial train.

‘Yes, Colin, thank you for your expertise,’ Biddy broke in crisply, interrupting my reverie. I had just got to the bit in my recollection of that inglorious episode where Biddy realized where Henry was. His Fourtrak was at the Dairy, parked round the back, keys in the ignition.

Instead of coming upstairs and catching us in flagrante, she simply removed the keys from the ignition, and threw them in the Lar. So when Henry came down, he was forced to telephone Biddy from my house and beg her to bring the spare set from the dresser at Lower Foxcombe, so his humiliation was complete.