A rare mother, Tessa, is a friend of Henry and Sandra. She knows Jomier from Ned’s birthday parties which she has attended with her four-year-old daughter Tatty (Tatiana). Tessa is happy to talk to Jomier. It makes a change from chatting to her Estonian au pair. Tessa is lean and thin, her long legs tightly clad in designer jeans. She is in her late thirties or early forties – attractive but without the bloom of youth. Tessa has an Eton and Oxford husband who makes bucketfuls of money. They have spent a million pounds on a house and another half a million doing it up. She has a child; an au pair; a Prius – yet she is, Jomier senses, discontented. She wonders if, by not working, she has disappointed her parents who spent so much money on her education. Is she wasting her university degree?

Jomier tries to reassure her. A child surely benefits from the presence of its mother. But is he confident of the truth of what he says? Is a child any better off with a mother who worries about not working than with a mother who works and worries about not looking after her child? Pushing swings, hovering around climbing frames, waiting at the bottom of slides – this is dull stuff. If one turns one’s mind to other things – if one takes one’s eye off the ball and thinks about Virginia Woolf or a Jamie Oliver recipe – then Ivo or Hermione might slip and fall onto bouncy tarmac or bed of wood chippings.

Was it a mistake to educate women? Jomier remembers the buffoon in Stendhal’s De L’Amour: ‘If women are educated they will no longer be content to look after their children.’ Stendhal makes him the mouthpiece of reaction but is there not something in what he says? Jomier’s friend Theo tells Jomier that women should be educated to make them suitable wives for educated men. But that is not the way women see it. They want to be educated to be able to live independently from men. They are empowered by their university degrees. This is why Tessa, the mother in the playground, is uneasy. What was the point of a degree in Politics and Economics from Oxford if it was not to pursue a career? But then what is the point of a nine-to-five job in a boring office when she has more than enough money as it is? She wants Jomier to solve this riddle. He is old and so may be wise.