On my first visit to Cherub Cottage, I also met her partner. He was a pharmacist who said very little, but when she spoke, which she did ceaselessly, I could see him trying to gauge my reaction to her. He was better looking, better dressed and younger than she was. When I first met him he was twenty-six. He seemed to have no quirks of his own, though he tolerated hers without complaint. As I saw more of her, I realised how much he had to put up with: she would not allow any food to cross her threshold that didn’t come from Marks & Spencer; she forced him to redecorate their house from top to bottom every year, and new curtains and carpets every three years; she sent a tedious, self-aggrandising round robin letter to everyone they knew at Christmas, full of exclamation marks. Reading the one she sent me, I could hardly believe it wasn’t a parody. Some of her household appliances had names. The microwave was called ‘Ding’, the doorbell ‘Dong’.

During that first discussion the three of us had, I kept trying to include her partner and find out what he wanted Cherub Cottage’s garden to be, but whenever I succeeded in coaxing an opinion out of him, she automatically said, ‘No,’ and corrected him. From what I managed to glean from him, in between her negations, it seemed he was happy with things pretty much as they were. The front and back gardens they’d inherited from the previous owners of Cherub Cottage (or number 8, as it had been in those days) couldn’t have been more traditional: lush green lawns surrounded by flower beds on all sides. He said he wouldn’t mind if I filled the gaps in the beds, that he thought they ought to be fuller—that was the only adjective he could think of to describe what he wanted—but when I started to talk about a riotous, voluptuous planting plan, he nodded eagerly. ‘A cottage ought to have a ramshackle garden,’ he said, before she leaped in with one of her ‘no’s.

‘I don’t want it messy,’ she said. ‘Any flowers, I want them colour-coordinated and in rows, not sticking out all over the place. Can you pick up a pink and purple theme? Pink roses, and purple slate in the beds instead of dirt? I saw that in a magazine.’ She always said ‘dirt’ when she meant ‘earth’.