Judith nods, then looks over her shoulder to see if she should help Ruth serve up the chicken-and-mushroom fricassee from the Aga. She rises, goes to the Aga but is sent straight back to her seat. ‘Where were we?’ she asks Jomier.

‘Sex.’

Judith sighs. ‘Yes, sex. Sex before marriage. A good thing or a bad thing?’

‘A good thing, surely.’

‘Well, I think so because if I’d married later my marriage might have lasted . . .’

‘To Beresford?’

‘To whoever. But because I married at the age of twenty, without having sown any wild oats whatsoever, there came a moment when I was bogged down with the children and bored by Beresford and I thought to myself – Am I really going to die only ever having slept with one man? And there was this very attractive other man and we’d have lunch together and the time came when we either did it or we didn’t do it and we did do it, and Beresford found out and it broke him. Poor Beresford. He wasn’t cut out to be a mari complaisant.’

‘What happened to the other man?’

Judith laughs. ‘He got scared and ran off.’

‘He left you?’

‘He had a wife.’

‘Did you think that he would leave his wife?’

‘I hadn’t really thought it through.’

‘And since?’

Judith does not answer his question but continues with her train of thought. ‘But are women really better off? My daughter Ophelia has led the life of a liberated woman – a career, relationships, a six-month marriage, divorce, bla-bla-bla – and now she’s thirty-eight with no boyfriend, mixing with exes and rejects, and the prospect of a nuclear family looking increasingly remote.’

‘And Beresford?’

‘Oh, Beresford’s fine. He’s made a pile of money in the City, and married again – a mousy, calculating, demure risk analyst – who as soon as she had secured Beresford stopped work and now spends her time doing up their houses in Chelsea and Gloucestershire and the South of France.’

‘While you . . .’

‘I get by in Wandsworth.’