Longer pause.

He couldn’t threaten Watts, or cancel the cheque – this is Honeyborne, not Highbury and Islington – because if he did, sure as eggs, Ralph would find himself seated next to Colin at the Harvest Supper. In the end, Ralph ended up buying a whole lot more dry wood and agreed to keep all the wet wood as well, which was a result. For Colin Watts.

Seeing Ralph’s interest – indeed, as if to draw attention to the lofty proportions of his own heraldic chimneypiece – Granville takes up a seigneurial position with his back to the fire, legs apart. So far, we are the only guests, and I am wondering whether Cath is expecting us to eat all the canapés on our own.

Granville is chatting amiably to Ralph, and I hear him say that crude futures are at over $100 a barrel and something about the price in pounds per therm, and then I hear Ralph talk about the closure of some random pipeline between Belarus and Moscow and I think, bo-ring! Who cares if West Germany can’t get enough oil?

Meanwhile, Cath is rapidly establishing my credentials and downloading all my key data as concerns the crucial female subject areas of children’s schools, where we lived in London, on which communal garden, on which side of which garden, down to what exact house number in Colville Crescent we used to occupy.

As we both know, these questions are designed to establish in a short time whether I am important or worth cultivating, and have to be asked in order for us to progress to the next stage of our association, which is friendship.

I simply let her get on with it, quite chuffed that Cath seems to think that my contacts book is worth copying, taking it as a compliment rather than an inquisition.

‘And do you shoot?’ Granville asks Ralph, during a pause in a debate over Gazprom and oil levies that remains impregnable to me or Cath.

Ralph quivers like a gun-dog at his peg. He loves shooting, and Cobb’s enquiry seems to hint that many fine days out on hill and heather await him, all fully comped, of course, by Granville Cobb, Esq.

And so then the men plunge into an animated discussion about beaters and pegs and the height of birds over coverts. I haven’t heard Ralph so chirpy for ages, and Cath and I relax that our husbands are getting on so famously but, then, I hear Granville say something.

I find I can no longer focus on Cath’s blue gaze and her advanced plans to site her farm shop (Rose is one of many local suppliers) in the Tithe Barn, and add on an organic café. Could he – Granville – possibly have said what I heard him saying?

‘I’m sorry, Granville,’ says Ralph. ‘I must be going deaf. I don’t think I quite caught what you just said.’

Granville raises an eyebrow, at which Maddocks bounds over with a fresh, chilled bottle of Champagne, an ironed white napkin wrapped around its neck like a scarf on a sickly child.