And was that it? Nights at home, swotting over papers as she had done when she was qualifying? The adrenalin rush of picking up a brief on a Monday night, with only twelve hours before your court appearance in some far-flung regional dump, no prospect of sleep, seat-of-the-pants stuff, thinking on your feet . . . And she’d still managed to fit in friends and parties and the first ecstatic months of her relationship with Andy, turning up at court still drunk, still high on sex, it must have been written all over her face, she must have smelt of him . . .

There was no point in dwelling on the past, although every avenue of thought seemed to lead there. She was forty-seven, single, starting again, the mother of two children of whom she was very proud, and very fond, although she wondered how much the feeling was reciprocated. Ben was a sweetheart, of course, big on the cuddles, always telling her (particularly since the divorce) that she was his best friend and the World’s Number One Mum – but he could not have been less interested in her career if he tried. It was, for him, just a fact of life, the thing that put bread on the table. Mummy goes to work in a funny black dress and a white hat, he’d said when he was five, and never got much further than that.

As for Isabelle, her firstborn, her beautiful daughter, whom she loved and worried about far too much for both of them – Isabelle had always been a daddy’s girl. Fair enough – she resembled Andy far more than she did Christine, from her skin tone onwards. Sometimes even Christine found it hard to believe that her beautiful brown baby was really her own – although she could never forget the agony of childbirth. It was always to Andy that Isabelle went first when she was in trouble (often) or short of money (always). She loved Christine with the kind of fierce, competitive love that often exists between mothers and daughters. Christine had tried, throughout Isabelle’s teens, to play it cool, to ease off with the discipline, to be a friend rather than a mother – and had ended up being neither. Now, quite clearly, Isabelle saw her only as a source of finance. That she blamed her mother for driving her father away was written all over her face – that gorgeous, symmetrical, doll-like face that fell so easily into a sulk or a pout, making the smiles, when they came, even more dazzling by contrast.

She washed up, put on some music – she always worked better with some dramatic aural background, in this case Mahler’s Second – and hauled her papers out of her case. Yes, the case of Farmer Giles v the Farmer’s Wife was in the bag. The coup de grâce was prepared, the weapons primed, Mrs Giles ready to blurt out a few embarrassing facts in the witness box. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, surely by the weekend, Farmer Giles would lose the farm.