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of duty and responsibility, as well as everything there was to know about sex, about which Baronne Gertrude was surprisingly relaxed.
    Although the Baronne had a deep-seated and unshakeable belief that everyone was looking for one person to love, she tolerated the open-ended relationships which, like the new multiplex cinemas, had replaced the monoliths of the past, but was absolutely convinced that those who indulged in them were destined to get hurt.
    Baronne Gertrude talked openly to her granddaughter about sex from the age of puberty onwards. She explained that it was a joyous experience and as crucial to life as breathing. Clare thought that she must be the only girl in London to debate with her grandmother the wisdom of losing her virginity to the first man (married and with two children) into whose arms she had fallen after leaving her convent school.
    A great many men had bitten the dust since then, but although, like Napoleon in War and Peace, her grandmother had little time for the medical profession and did not mind saying so, the Baronne’s favourite, among Clare’s many admirers, was Jamie.
    The fact that Jamie – who was wont to recite chunks of Shakespeare over his anaesthetised patients in the operating theatre – immediately recognised the sentiments as Tolstoy’s endeared him at once to the Baronne.
    After a shaky start – Jamie had failed to hold the Baronne’s chair for her at dinner and had committed the solecism of cutting the ‘nose’ off the Brie – the two of them had got on famously. While the Baronne often entertained Jamie with tales of her girlhood in Sauternes and stories about her life at Cluzac, their shared interest was literature and they enjoyed attributing each other’s quotations.
    Clare and Jamie had been invited to dinner to celebrate the Baronne’s birthday, for which she had given the menu a great deal of thought and her current au pair, who attended English classes in South Kensington, a hard time. Baronne Gertrude did not cook and rarely entered the kitchen, which had not been renovated since the death of the first Lady Donaldson.
    Born, bred and having lived for the greater part of her life in a château, the Baronne, although perfectly capable of giving instructions to others, had very little practical knowledge of running a home. In the eighteenth century, according to her wide reading on the subject, before domestic space had misguidedly become the female prerogative, the women’s quarters in the great French houses were as distant from the kitchens as the men’s, an indicator that they did not have even a supervisory role over the domestic arrangements. As far as she was concerned ‘home’ was not by any means synonymous with ‘woman’ and she considered the class divide to be far more significant than that of gender.
    Her formative years had been spent in a country house of which, despite the passage of time, her recollections were extraordinarily clear. They were defined by favourite and specific places. The chapel, the billiard room, the dining-room, the drawing-rooms, the library, her parents’ apartments, the guest rooms and the nursery quarters, the vast, seemingly endless andsometimes terrifying corridors, the many staircases. Once Jamie had asked her how many rooms there were and Gertrude, astonished by the question, had replied that to the best of her knowledge no one had ever counted them, and that she had absolutely no idea.
    All she remembered was that her childhood (from which by now the disagreeables had been filtered out) had been an unmitigated delight. Rides in the early-morning mists, homework in the nursery, games of croquet, tennis, pingpong, fishing, bicycle rides and bathing in opaque muddy waters, spring hunting when the children – she was one of six – were left to their own devices, parties and summer weddings, and picnics by the lake.
    With her needs now attended to by a single and frequently changing au pair (Louise, Chantal,