Ralph never calls me Imogen. Unless he thinks I’ve done something wrong. He called me Imogen on that Guy Fawkes night, of course, when he revealed that he knew all about my fling with Si, who – just to complete the humiliation – was two-timing me with Posy’s teacher. Then he said he had sold our house to Clare, i.e. the pluperfect tense, had sold. There was no going back, the action had been completed and achieved in the past. And then he said that Posy’s teacher was pregnant. By the man I had slept with outside my marriage. It was all very complicated.

And then he said we were moving to Dorset, which we did, eighteen months ago.

So, yes, you could say that Ralph picks his moments to deploy the word ‘Imogen’, my Christian name, which no one ever calls me unless they are really, really angry, like a lethal weapon.

‘Oh God. I’m sorry, darling. I don’t know why I said that Ralph mutters. But it is too late.

‘And whose, exactly, do you think it is?’ I hear myself yelling, enraged. In fact, I must be yelling my head off, because I hear Posy and Cas shout, ‘Shut up, Mummy,’ in rare unison, at the same time as Ralph is hissing, ‘Quiet! Do you want our children to hear?’ I just can’t believe Ralph dredged up Si and my moment of madness to throw at me now. ‘Is it mine,’ he dares to enquire!

Well, I can’t exactly get into the fact there isn’t anyone beddable for miles around. Apart from Henry Pike, but he shags anything that moves – he once told me that he’d ‘covered the waterfront’ in West Dorset of everyone between the ages of ‘sixteen and sixty’ and then, proudly, in the next breath, that he had ‘serviced so many old boilers’ that he was thinking of ‘applying for a Corgi registration’. And apart from Jesse Marlon Bryanston, and Ned and, actually, now I come to think of it, the Chairman of the West Dorset Staghounds, Harvey Jones, also Chairman of the Parish Council (any sort of power is terribly attractive) is handsome in a basset-houndy way. But I am obviously not going to go there. For Ralph is staring at me levelly, as if facing a firing squad.