Mirabel and I have reached a new ‘phase’ in our relationship. Basically, she ignores me unless I do something so deliberately annoying – such as dancing/singing along to radio/borrowing her special DuWop Lip Venom and managing to ‘mank it up’, i.e. get one single speck of dirt on to the lid. Then she will threaten to get a gun and shoot me. At least, that’s what she said when I started grooving on down to Lily Allen in front of Aspen from the stable cottages and Spike, Sophy’s son, who was also here, from the eco-village. ‘Nooo!’ she started wailing. ‘Noooooo!’ and mimed blasting my head off.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I say. I think my grooming is – in comparison with recent sorties, anyway, of a reasonably high standard, if not dressage at International Horse Show Olympialevel.

‘What I mean is,’ says Mirabel in a softer voice, ‘I’m kidding. Actually, you look sick.’ She removes her copy of a book called Bratfest at Tiffany’s, the sequel to Sealed with a Diss, from the floor, and makes as if to leave.

‘Sick! But you like this dress,’ I protest, before she exits. ‘It’s not the black one, the one you told me you didn’t want even after I was dead! It’s a different one, from the Joseph sale.’

‘Oh Mum, you’re, like, so out of date. Sick means good. You’re rocking that dress. You own that dress. You look quite hot – for you, that is,’ my daughter continues. ‘Even if you have put on, like, a tiny bit of weight recently, it still looks nice.’ And I glow with pride. From Mirabel, this is highest praise, even if her compliment contained, as compliments often do, an implied criticism or insult.

It is enough for me, for now, that I look nice in that dress, even if I only look nice compared to how I look the rest of the time.

Ralph points the Subaru in the direction of Court Place, and I look at my make-up in the mirror and perform a swift teeth and nostril check. As Mirabel points out, my teeth act as a sort of trap or net, efficiently snagging food before it passes down my throat and, as for the nostrils – why does 1. no one ever tell you about the sudden efflorescence of nostril hair in one’s late thirties and 2. how to remove it?

So, Court Place. At last.

There’s a huge house and outbuildings, a shoot and a farm shop with fourteen different sorts of sausage, she’s got four children, like all alpha mothers, and he’s something in hedge funds or private equity, like all alpha fathers.

While most women with four or more children will never, ever leave this fact alone, Cath does. Four children is just another thing she does along with everything else.