Madame Dupont usually walked home after her cleaning stints at La Cour des Roses – she claimed she’d walked all her life and wasn’t going to stop now. The woman must be in her seventies, but I’d swear she was fitter than I was. The only time she allowed me to give her a lift was on a Saturday – after a longer, more tiring session.

‘I have something for you, Emie,’ she said as we got into the car. ‘Can you come inside for a moment?’

On the short drive, my mind worried over what that ‘something’ might be. I hoped it wasn’t another dead chicken. Madame Dupont kept a large flock of ugly black birds to dole out as eating chickens to her extensive family. She didn’t gift them to non-family lightly, but I’d been on the receiving end a couple of times – and although I appreciated the sentiment, I wasn’t too keen on the actuality.

I followed her up her path, peering over the fence into her yard where the noisy birds scurried about, scrapping with each other. In the kitchen, she invited me to sit at the scrubbed wooden table while she stowed her bag and cardigan and gave a brief tug at her support stockings, which had sagged during the course of the day. How she could bear to wear them in this heat, I would never know.

I’d been in here before, and it was like stepping back in time. No fitted units, but free-standing painted wooden cupboards, an old stove, a noisy fridge. Her appliances could have been used in a vintage TV programme, and the ancient wallpaper in a violent pattern of browns and yellows made me nauseous. But it was all, as you’d expect, spotlessly clean.

Madame Dupont bustled over to a huge pan on the stove. ‘I made chicken stew yesterday. My niece and her family were coming to dinner, but the baby was poorly. Now I am left with all this. I will give you some, so you and that handsome fiancé of yours can have it one evening when you are too tired to cook.’

Her French was rapid, her accent strong, but nowadays I understood most of what she said, and she corrected my own French less and less.

‘Couldn’t you freeze it for yourself?’ I asked her.

‘There is plenty to spare.’ She beckoned me over to peer into the pot. It was full to the brim and smelled delicious. ‘Besides, I am not sure how much longer that freezer will last.’ She pointed towards the ancient chest freezer in the corner of the room, its white enamel rusted around the bottom. ‘Yet another thing that is past its best around here. It would be just my luck if it gave up when it was full of chicken casserole. You may as well take some.’

‘Well, if you’re sure …’

Smiling, she bent to open the door of a cupboard, the door dangling dangerously on its hinges, and I made a mental note to ask Rupert or Ryan to drop in and fix it. Taking a small brown casserole pot from the paper-lined shelf, she ladled a generous amount into it.

‘Thank you.’ I kissed her on the cheek. ‘Alain and I will enjoy this. Do you need a lift into Pierre-la-Fontaine for the bus?’

Madame Dupont usually spent a night or two at her sick sister’s each week. With no transport of her own, it was quite a trek for her, walking along the lane to the main road, waiting for a bus into town, then another bus on to her sister’s.

‘That is kind, Emie, but I have things to do. My neighbour, Monsieur Girard, will give me a lift into town later.’

Waving goodbye, I placed the pot carefully on the passenger seat and drove slowly back. The last thing I needed was gravy all over the upholstery – Jonathan would never forgive me, since it used to be his car. He’d sold it to me when he decided to give up driving.

I smiled with sweet anticipation at the thought of an evening with Alain, enjoying Madame Dupont’s homely chicken stew – with the added advantage that I hadn’t had to pluck and de-gut the chicken myself.

But that would have to wait until tomorrow. Tonight, I had to help Rupert cook for the guest meal and entertain.

Rupert got back from his jaunt with Bob to find me tired but chipper.

Overall, my day had been a success. My breakfast eggs had been palatable – or at least, nobody had left them; I’d plied Abigail Harris with cappuccinos until she didn’t know whether she was jittery from the caffeine or her rabbit corpse encounter; I’d fitted in a quick morning phone call with my gorgeous half-French, half-English fiancé (best of both worlds, as Rupert once pointed out); I’d been on the receiving end of Madame Dupont’s casserole, and I’d finally wrested the disintegrating rabbit from the dog without having my hand chewed off.

All in all, I figured I was on a roll.

I made Rupert a mug of tea while he filled the welcome baskets for the gîtes with homemade chutneys and jam, local bread and cheese. New arrivals were due any time now.

‘Are you still a free man?’ I enquired.

‘Yes. Tired, but unarrested.’

I figured he was on a roll, too, then. ‘Tell me what happened with Gloria in London.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘But I do. That’s why I asked. Of course, you’re under no obligation to tell me.’

His lips twitched. ‘No, but you’ll nag me mercilessly until I do.’

‘Well?’

He sighed. ‘When we got there, I sent Bob for a coffee while I packed up my personal stuff. Gloria watched me like a hawk. We negotiated over furniture when Bob came back. He insisted he should be there in case my blood pressure got so high that I required an ambulance.’

Good old Bob. Rupert’s angina attack last year had given his friends a scare, and we were all still mindful of it. I smiled at the extent of Bob’s friendship. He knew what he was letting himself in for when he agreed to accompany Rupert – Rupert and Gloria had been at loggerheads for months over Rupert’s assets – but it couldn’t have been pleasant.

‘Gloria’s given notice to the tenants in her house, and she’ll live in the Kensington flat until she can move back there. I’ve brought back a few smaller pieces of furniture, but there wasn’t much I wanted. Gloria chose most of it, and it wasn’t all to my taste.’

That, I could well imagine. Rupert had superb taste at the guesthouse – elegant but practical antiques, light walls, fabrics in naturals with splashes of colour in the rugs and cushions. Quality over quantity. Gloria, on the other hand, had not been able to deny the tackier side of her inner interior decorator, and when I’d first visited La Cour des Roses, it was an interesting clash. Slowly but surely, we’d consigned her influence to history.

‘We signed a list of everything and what was to happen to it,’ Rupert went on as he took milk and packets of butter from the fridge and added them to the baskets.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Sounds quite civilised, for you two.’

‘Gloria’s not stupid. She knows which battles to fight.’

‘I’m amazed she hasn’t fought to stay put in that flat.’

‘The running costs are too high. Besides, it’s worth a fortune. She’d rather have a stack of money in the bank so she won’t have to work. It suits her fine.’

I shot him a sympathetic smile. ‘You’re holding up well, considering.’

‘We all knew what it would be like, once the divorce got under way.’

‘I know, but I’m sorry you have to go through it.’

‘I’m not. It means there’s a finite end to it. As long as I can keep La Cour des Roses, I’m happy to draw a line under the whole thing. Sending Gloria packing last year was the right thing to do.’

You’re telling me. I opened my mouth to say it but closed it again, making Rupert laugh. Gloria waltzing off with my boyfriend, dumping him a few weeks later, then trying to inveigle her way back into Rupert’s life had certainly been a trying phase in our lives.

‘You will get to keep La Cour des Roses, won’t you?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. Gloria’s house is being taken into consideration, and since we’re selling the London flat and the house in Mallorca, I can’t see a problem. Although that sodding Mallorcan property’s proving hard to shift. Ellie’s been liaising on my behalf for months now, to no avail.’

‘It’s good of her to take some of the weight off your shoulders.’

As the town’s estate agent, Ellie had homed in on the one thing she could do to help Rupert through his divorce, taking on the role of adviser and liaison with his estate agent in Mallorca.

‘I can’t believe Gloria’s going for so much,’ I said as I passed him bottles of local wine to finish off the baskets. ‘You were only together for ten years, and most of your assets were yours already.’

‘Gloria can argue – and does – that she gave up her job and friends to be with me. That she spent years in this place, hating every minute. That she added value to the business over those years.’

I snorted inelegantly, and Rupert put an end to the conversation by gathering up his baskets and dashing across the lavender-lined courtyard to the gîtes as the first car pulled up. Talk about cutting it fine.

‘I wouldn’t mind an early night tonight,’ I told him as we started to cook.

No longer intimidated by his chefs’ knives and fancy pans and super-duper gadgets in the huge wood and granite kitchen, I’d graduated from chopping vegetables and fruit, and was now allowed to do other things – although never pastry (mine ended up like grey putty, but less useful) and never sauces (gooey messes and burned pans).

‘What makes you think you’ll get that?’

‘I live in hope. At least we have a fighting chance, now we hive the guests off outside or to the lounge after dinner.’

Our three guest meals a week were taken in the kitchen, and it used to be that people chattered and lingered after the meal, preventing us from clearing away and washing up. But over the winter, Rupert and I had decorated and refurnished the lounge until it was how I – er, I mean we – envisaged it, and now we had no qualms about shoving our guests in there for after-dinner coffee, or out to the patio with solar lanterns if the weather allowed, enabling us to get sorted in the kitchen.

‘Anyway, they’re hardly a lively bunch at the moment, are they?’ I pointed out. ‘We ran out of conversation by dessert last time. What are the newbies like?’

‘Diane and John? They seem nice enough.’

But when we settled in the lounge after the meal, Diane spotted the pile of games on the bookshelf and squealed, ‘Ooh, let’s play something!’

Her husband was all for it, the other guests didn’t want to be impolite, and Rupert and I felt obliged to join in to jolly things along, meaning that clearing up in the kitchen had to be done later – much later.

So much for an early night.

When I pulled up at Alain’s neat suburban house the next morning, I walked straight into the comfort of his arms, my head against his chest – he was so tall, that was as far as I reached without standing on tiptoe. Sundays were my day to spend with him, and I looked forward to them immensely.

‘Are you staying over tonight?’ he murmured hopefully against my hair, leading me into the lounge, an airy space I loved with its cream walls and furnishings, wooden furniture and coffee-coloured cushions adding warmth.

‘I can’t see why not.’

We each had half our stuff at the other’s, and I spent half my life wondering where I’d left my favourite T-shirt. I couldn’t wait till I moved in with him properly, after our honeymoon, when La Cour des Roses was less busy and we could all settle into a new way of doing things.

‘Good.’ He fixed his cinnamon-brown eyes on mine. His gaze never ceased to make me feel warm and wanted. ‘Want to get the bikes out?’

‘Okay by me.’

The first time Alain put me on a bike, I was pretty dubious, but we cycled regularly at weekends now, and although I wasn’t keen on busy roads, they were only a means to an end. Once we got onto a quiet country lane or track, I was happy to be out there. My leg muscles had improved and no longer felt like jelly. Unless we went too far. Or up any hills.

Alain’s few attempts to get me into running hadn’t met with the same success. I couldn’t see the point of pounding the pavement – or grass or dirt track or any other surface, come to that. My knees ached and I would end up as red as a beetroot, not least because Alain was a good foot taller than me and I probably had to run twice as far to keep up. Eventually, he accepted that he was on a loser with that one. He continued to run early in the mornings before work, and I suspected he enjoyed the solitude. Each to his own.

As the main roads gave way to lanes, and the lanes to tracks, any tension in me gradually eased. How could it not? All I had to do was let my arms and legs worry about the bike while I greedily drank in the glory that was the French countryside. Farmers’ fields, green and gold, crops in full swing. Hedgerows. Occasional fields of roses that the area was famed for, their vibrant colours stretching out and taking my breath away. Swathes of vines in straight rows, deep green in the afternoon sun, the soil beneath dry and dusty.

And then there were the sunflowers, a green carpet topped with bright yellow heads, their faces turned to the afternoon sun, a vast stretch of summer colour and, for me, the epitome of the season.

‘I love those,’ I said as we stopped by a field of them to drink from our water bottles.

‘Les tournesols?’

‘Yes. They’re glorious. And so very French.’

Alain smiled. ‘They’re coming to an end now. It won’t be long before they’re dead and drooping and sad-looking.’

I pouted at the thought.

‘Don’t do that,’ he murmured. ‘It makes me want to kiss you.’

I stuck my bottom lip out further, and he obliged with a kiss that became heated in seconds, despite the months we’d been together. When he pulled back, those caramel eyes of his were intent on mine. ‘Better get home.’

His words held wicked promise.

And that was another thing I liked about cycling on a Sunday – what happened afterwards. We would get back hot, sweaty and tired, necessitating showers followed by a … lie-down. No time limits. The rest of the afternoon stretched out in front of us as we stretched out on the bed, lazily kissing and stroking and making love, my body humming with pleasure as Alain worked magic with his hands until my limbs felt boneless, and stress and tension seemed a million miles away.

Best part of the week.