“Brilliant!” Tom says. “I’ll make some apple turnovers for pud.” He takes the jar and the flowers into the kitchen.

She accepts the offer of white wine and I show her into the sitting room. When I return with two glasses of Chablis, she’s seated on the sofa with Bailey curled in her lap. “How he’s grown.” She looks up. “I saw him when he was at the kennels, a tiny grub of a creature. I fed him from a little bottle.”

I set her glass on the coffee table in front of her and sit down in the rhino-like leather armchair. “He was on rusks by the time he came here,” I tell her. “When Lucy foisted him on me.”

“She’s quite ruthless,” Ellen agrees. “But she’ll be so pleased with his progress.” She leans forward for her glass. “To your good health, James.”

“And yours.”

For the first time I look at her properly. She’s in a long dress of some soft woolly material, the color a deep blue. Flat leather boots, elegant yet suitable for the lanes. Her hair is put up as usual but this time cunningly braided in on itself somehow, to make a fascinatingly complicated woven bun high on the back of her head. The overall effect is both feminine and disciplined. She might be a member of some exclusive order of women—not religious, not necessarily spiritual at all, but dedicated all the same to a selfless cause. Rescuing men, perhaps. Seeking out the terrible knots we get ourselves into and untying them, gently and practically, without condescension. I wonder what I must look like to her, in my clean but aged clothes, against my backdrop of tumbledown furniture. Should I apologize for the state of the place? I’m pretty sure, from the way she’s bending her head to stroke Bailey, that she’s taking care not to show she’s noticed it. I break the silence.

“Have you got a dog, Ellen?”

She shakes her head. “Dogs can’t help it, but they do startle the birds. And when I’m walking I like to see yellowhammers in the hedgerows. And the flocks of plovers in the fields under Beacon Hill, in the winter. You walk by and they lift and fall in a wave.” She mimics the wave with her hand. “If I’m out with Althea Brock and her blessed Stuart, they scatter entirely.”

I remember my encounter with Stuart outside Althea Brock’s house. How long ago it seems, that day when Ellen came upon me in the shrubbery. Shall I tell her? No, not now. Not while she’s looking at me like this, her face friendly and open, her eyes full of the lively, seeking interest that I remember from the party.

“Your son has learned to cook, it seems!” she says next.

“Luckily for us. Although supper may feature chickpeas.”