Lastly, I glance at Virginie Lacoste who, with her colourless and conventional husband Mathieu, has been in residence since Friday, leaving the children, twins Capucine and Clementine, and Guy, back in Lonsdale Gardens with the uniformed nanny, NouNou. Her silken blonde hair hangs straight to her narrow shoulders, and she is wearing a puffy but narrow-wristed Chloé blouse tucked into a Nanette Lepore sailor skirt, a skirt that accentuates her tiny waist with a triple row of six gold, anchor-studded nautical buttons. I can’t see her legs under the table, but when I inspected them earlier, they were clad in gossamer white stockings, and shoes with square buckles on them, which was annoying because, as every woman knows, only those with sensational legs can get away with anything but black opaques.

Jesse Marlon tried not to stare at her when she threw her head back and laughed, showing a pearly horseshoe of perfect teeth. But it was clear that he has not seen anything quite so blatantly, expensively sexy since Lulu went to London and came back with a pair of thigh-high Christian Louboutin red-soled boots that she pranced around Godminster Hall in, naked except for a pair of cami-knickers and a lacy teddy, in front of me and Ned and Jesse Marlon and a pargeter who was carving a peregrine falcon on an architrave.

As my eyes meet hers, she gives me a tiny shrug and a pout, as if to say, ‘Ere we go again!’

Virginie finds the English love of a strain-making planning dispute, the intensity of their feelings for their pets, their love of comfortable clothes and nursery food and their dogged but often doomed efforts to remain true to their spouses, wildly incomprehensible.

The only silver lining in all this as far as I’m concerned is that the gathering storm might give Virginie second thoughts about her declared yearning to buy a property in what she calls the ‘countryside’. More specifically, it might deter her from homing in on my patch.

I thought I’d cleverly dissuaded her from viewing any properties in Godminster. But in fact, I’ve only managed to bring her even closer to home. As she told me over what she called the zakouski in the drawing room, she and Mathieu are staying over Sunday night so they can be the first viewers and prospective owners of the gatehouse at Hutton, a mini-estate between Honeyborne and Larcombe Ducis, owned by Sir Michael Hutton.

This hardly bears thinking about.

Granville finishes scribbling. ‘Here,’ says Granville, ripping off a cheque, and handing it to Ned with a wolfish smile. ‘I think that should just about cover it, mmm?’

I see Cath crane over and decipher the amount.

‘Don’t worry,’ she tells me later. ‘Granville did cut Ned a big cheque, but it’s OK. To Gran, it’s still cab fare. Now, who wants tea? We’ve got ’erbal,’ (Cath dropped the h) ‘PG Tips… lapsang…’