‘Well, even if you’re listed as Lady Holman, everyone will know who you are.’ One says these things and I said this, although, as is often the case in such circumstances, I did not believe it to be true.

‘Well…’ She paused awkwardly. I had hoped that William’s success in the City would have bolstered her confidence, but the reverse seemed to have happened.

‘Can we discuss it? I’m going to be driving very near you next week. Could I possibly look in?’

‘When?’

Once more, as with Lucy Dalton, I sensed a trapped animal searching for a route out, scanning the net for a possible tear, which I firmly closed off with my next speech. ‘It entirely depends on you. I’ve got some stuff to do in Winchester but I can easily fit it round your diary. What day would suit best? It’d be such fun to see you again after all these years.’

She was enough of a lady to know when she was caught. ‘Yes, it would. Of course it would. Why not come for some lunch next Friday?’

‘Will William be with you?’

‘Yes. He doesn’t really like my entertaining when he’s not here.’ This sentence had escaped her mouth before she fully grasped its ugly, bullying significance. The words seemed to reverberate down the line between us. After a silent pause she attempted to round off its sharp edges: ‘He gets so jealous when he finds he’s missed seeing people he likes. I know he’d love to catch up with you.’

‘Me, too,’ I answered, because I had to. I was not quite clear how I would carry out my mission if William was too controlling to allow us a moment together, but there was nothing I could do about that. ‘I’ll be with you on Friday, just before one.’

Bellingham Court was a real house. It was about five miles from Winchester and not perhaps quite far enough from the motorway, but it was a genuine Elizabethan schloss, with high mullioned windows and corbelled ceilings and panelled great chambers and whispering passages, a thoroughly satisfactory ego-puffer of a place. As I turned in through the neatly painted gates, and drove down the long, tended and impeccable drive, it was easy to see it had been the subject of a recent, and massive, restoration programme. I parked in the wide forecourt, bordered by two broad, shallow parterres of water, edged in new and expensively carved stone, and before I had time to ring the bell the door was opened by a middle aged woman in sensible shoes, whom I took, correctly, to be the housekeeper. She led me inside.

The money here was not comparable to Damian’s Croesus-like hoards. The Holmans were very rich, that was all, not super-duper-Bill-Gates-unbelievably rich. Just rich. But they were rich enough, by heaven. The hall was large, stone-flagged, and off-white, with a dark, carved screen at one end and some wonderful furniture. These items had been selected as contemporary with the house, which I later discovered was not the theme in the other downstairs rooms, the designer having decided that Tudor artefacts are easy to admire but hard to live with. The style had therefore been confined to the hall, with a few pieces in the library. There was in this a kind of premeditation, a sort of thought-out pattern that, just as in Damian’s Surrey palace, was oddly undermining to any sense of country living. Proper country houses have a kind of randomness, objects and furniture are deliberately thrown together, survivals of many other houses, which have somehow all ended up there in a kind of chic higgledy-piggledy. Nor is this a skill unknown to many designers who, given ample time and money, can rustle up a house that looks as if the family have owned it since 1650, when in fact they moved in the summer of the previous year. But here, at Bellingham, this casual, comfortable elegance had not been achieved. In fact, there was a slightly disconcerting quality to the whole house that I cannot exactly describe, as if it had been prepared for an elaborate party to which I had not been invited. Had I been told it had been dressed for a photo shoot and I wasn’t to touch anything, it would not have surprised me. The pictures were almost all large, full, or three-quarter- length portraits, over-cleaned and a little too shiny. They had a foreign feel to them and I squinted at some of the name plaques on the most important ones, as I passed. ‘Frederick Francis, 1st Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Shwerin, 1756-1837’ said one, while another announced ‘Count Felix Beningbauer gennant Lupitz, 1812-1871, and his son, Maximilian.’

‘You see we are very pro-Europe in this house.’ The voice startled me and I looked up to see a tiny figure standing at the far end of the hall, looking more like a boy scout on bob-a-job week than a princess in late middle age. Of course, I knew it was Dagmar because her stature meant it had to be, but I could not at first find her in the face I was presented with. Her hair was grey, though as flat and lank as it had always been, and at last I recognised her wobbling, tremulous, anxious lips, but not much else of her youthful appearance had survived. Her eyes were still huge, but sadder now and, despite our luxurious setting, it seemed to me that for her, life had been a bumpy ride. We kissed, a little gauchely, two strangers pecking at each other’s cheeks, before she led me into the main drawing room, a fine, light chamber, but again with a synthetic air. It was the perfect mixture of Colefax chintz and antiques, Georgian this time, beautifully chosen as individual items but with no coherence as a whole. There was more of the splendid, European parade on the walls.

I indicated a couple of them. ‘I don’t remember you having all these in Trevor Square. Or were they in storage?’ We knew, without saying, that they formed no part of the provenance of Squire William de Holman.

She shook her head. ‘Neither.’ Now, at last, she was beginning to come back to me. The moist half-open mouth had firmed up a bit, but she still had that odd, discordant, tearful note in her voice, a faint, sad scrape of the vocal cords grinding together, that reminded me of the girl she had once been. ‘William has scouts in all the auction houses, and whenever there is a picture coming up with the faintest connection to me he bids for it.’ She did not elaborate on quite what this told us about her husband. No more did I.

‘Where is he?’

‘Choosing some wine for lunch. He won’t be long.’

She poured me a drink from a supply concealed in a large, carved, rococo cupboard in the corner which I saw, to my amusement, contained a small sink, and we talked. Dagmar was more aware of what I had been doing with my life than I anticipated and she must have noticed how flattered I was when she spoke of one particular novel that had barely broken the surface of the water. I thanked her. She gave a little smile. ‘I like to keep up with the news of the people I knew then.’

‘More than with the people themselves?’

She shrugged lightly. ‘Friendships are based on shared experience. I don’t know what we would all have in common now. William isn’t very… nostalgic for that time in his life. He prefers what happened later.’ Which did not surprise me. If I were him, so would I. ‘Do you see anyone from those days?’ I told her I’d visited Lucy. ‘Heavens, you are having a time of it. How is she?’

‘All right. Her husband’s got another business. I’m not sure how well it’s doing.’

She nodded. ‘Philip Rawnsley-Price. The one man we were all on the run from and Lucy Dalton ends up marrying him. How peculiar time is. I imagine he’s quite different now?’

‘Not different enough,’ I said ungenerously and we laughed. ‘I’ve seen Damian Baxter, too. Quite recently. Do you remember him?’

This time she let out a kind of giggling gasp that brought the old Dagmar I had known completely back into the room. ‘Do I remember him?’ she said. ‘How could I forget him when our names have been linked ever since?’ My mind running, as it was, on another track, this remark amazed me. Had I entirely missed a romance that everyone else knew about?