Mr Woodhouse had never paid much attention to any of this, which he regarded as the sort of thing that appealed to women but not to men. The wording of any caption to Isabella’s photograph could be worked out later – his immediate task was to find a photographer. This sent him off to the Yellow Pages, but he had not even begun to page through these when he remembered that he knew of a photographer who was right on their doorstep, or whose brother was.

George Knightley was the owner of one of the largest houses in the area, Donwell Abbey (twenty-four bedrooms). At the time at which Mr Woodhouse was thinking of publishing his daughter’s photograph, George was just twenty-five and had owned Donwell for four years. He had inherited not only a house, but looks too, his father having been described in a magazine article as one of the ten most handsome men in England. Knightley père had also been one of the most modest, as he never made any reference to this, or any other accolade that came his way. He had that endangered and most attractive quality: an old-fashioned Englishness, in appearance, garb, and manner, and a generosity of spirit that made him extremely popular in the neighbourhood. This ensured a sympathetic reception for his son when he took over the property. ‘Thank heavens,’ said people. ‘Think of what we might have had, with all these …’ Typically there then followed a listing of those who might have bought Donwell Abbey had it been put on the open market: hedge-fund people, dot-com people, Russian oligarchs, celebrities of various stripes – the list was a long one and generally concluded with a sigh of relief that the Knightleys remained exactly where they had been for centuries.

His parents were divorced when he was barely seven. It was not an acrimonious parting: both parties had gradually grown away from each other and recognised that they were, quite simply, bored with the other’s company and that this boredom was beginning to turn to irritation. They understood that when another’s mannerisms begin to grate, it is probably too late to retrieve the situation, even if a relationship might be patched up with a lot of effort and forbearance. He went off to live in Vancouver; she stayed at Donwell, which had now been given to her as part of a generous divorce settlement. The boys stayed with her and, for reasons of geography, saw their father only intermittently. He lost touch with England and, to an extent, with his sons, although he had never intended to desert them. For her part, she developed a close friendship with a man she met at a bridge club, and ended up travelling with him to competitions all over the world. It was on one of these trips, a visit to an international bridge tournament in Kerala, that she was hit by a car – an old Hindustan Ambassador with minimal brakes – and died. Her last memories were of the sun above her – so brilliant, so unrelenting – and concerned faces looking down on her: a boy wearing a blue shirt, a man in a khaki uniform who was shouting at the others; and then the sun again, and darkness.

Under the terms of her will, George inherited Donwell and the estate surrounding it, while his brother, John, was given such investments as his mother had. It was a roughly equitable division and it suited both of them. George had a sense of duty that his brother lacked; he also rather liked the challenge of restoring the Donwell farm to profitability. For John, his inheritance of easily realisable assets would enable him to indulge his taste for expensive cameras, forget the house that he had always found hopelessly uncomfortable and dull, and buy a flat in a fashionable part of London.

The young George Knightley’s commitment to Donwell was no passing fancy. Aided by his astute farm manager, he made sure that fields were used in such a way as to ensure maximum European Union grants. Old farm machinery was replaced with brand-new equipment, and diversification – the saviour of many a farmer who had found it impossible to make a living growing crops – was pursued with single-minded enthusiasm. This meant that several farm cottages that had been lying empty were made suitable for holiday lets; that beehives were introduced and a centrifuge bought for the extraction of honey from the comb; that a large flock of rare-breed sheep was established, as well as a farm shop selling home-cured bacon, jerseys and mittens made from the wool of the rare-breed sheep; in short, that every way of making a farm pay was examined, tried, and, if successful, implemented.

The proximity of Donwell Abbey to Hartfield meant that the Woodhouses and Knightleys saw a fair amount of each other. George Knightley had always been aware of the Woodhouse girls, of course, but they were, in his eyes, no more than two rather attractive teenage girls who had always been about the place and with whom he occasionally chatted. Isabella, of course, had always appreciated his looks, but the age gap between them made any thought of romance impossible. When she was sixteen, and beginning to take a strong interest in boys, he was twenty-four, and therefore impossibly old by teenage standards.

‘Life after twenty?’ Isabella said to a friend. ‘I don’t think so!’

‘Well, you’re hardly dead when you’re twenty-something,’ said the friend. ‘Maybe a bit past it, but not actually finished.’

‘That comes later.’

‘Yes, forty.’

They had laughed, but they actually meant it.

George thought nothing of age gaps. He might be older than Isabella, but he was nonetheless amused by her. He compared her with some of the girls he had met at university: in a few years she would be exactly like them, he thought – a county girl itching to find the right husband from the ranks of those young men who would make up her social circle. It was a harmless enough fate, even if a rather predictable one.

He was not so sure about Emma. She was a good dozen years younger than he was, and so when he returned to Donwell at the age of twenty-one she was only nine – a mere child. Over the years that followed, though, he saw the uncoordinated adolescent grow into a self-assured and rather beautiful young woman. He often saw her when he went to visit Mr Woodhouse, but it seemed to him that he was largely invisible to her. That, of course, was because he was a friend of her father and therefore of no interest to her other than as a vaguely avuncular figure. In spite of her indifference to him, he found himself appreciating her rather intriguing manner, her frequently unexpected, not to say mischievous observations, and her independent, insouciant manner. Emma, he thought, was growing up interesting.

Now Mr Woodhouse remembered what it was that George Knightley had said to him. He had told him that his brother had become something of a success as a photographer and had actually won a national competition a year or two earlier. ‘John has a bit of an eye,’ he said. ‘He always has had one. Odd, really, given that I can’t take a snap myself.’

Mr Woodhouse had not paid much attention at the time, but now it came back to him and he thought that the simple solution to his quest would be to invite John Knightley to take the picture.

He asked George for his brother’s number in London. Then, when he made the call, the telephone was answered after only one or two rings – always a good sign, thought Mr Woodhouse – and John Knightley came on the line.

‘We haven’t seen one another for some time,’ said Mr Woodhouse, trying to remember when it was that he had last seen John and wondering whether he still had an unhealthy complexion and rather lank hair.

‘Ages,’ said John. ‘Yonks.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘I see your brother quite a bit, of course. He often comes round here.’

‘He hasn’t got much to do,’ said John.

Mr Woodhouse sounded peeved. ‘He keeps busy enough, I’d say. He runs the farm rather well.’

‘With a manager, yes,’ said John, and then added, ‘Good old George.’

Mr Woodhouse ignored this remark. ‘You still taking photographs, John?’

‘Yes, Mr Woodhouse. That’s my job. I’m a fashion photographer in London. Vogue. Vanity Fair. Tatler. That’s me.’ He paused. ‘You won’t have seen my work, of course.’

Mr Woodhouse cleared his throat. This was a very irritating young man – very different from his equable and well-mannered brother. ‘I need a photograph of my daughter.’

‘Which one? The tall sexy one?’

Again Mr Woodhouse bit his tongue. ‘Isabella. She’s seventeen.’

‘Great age,’ said John. ‘You want me to do it?’

‘Yes. Can you?’

‘Do dogs bark?’ replied John. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

Mr Woodhouse frowned. ‘What?’

‘The answer’s yes. Happy to oblige, old son.’

The tone now became formal. Mr Woodhouse would expect John the following Saturday for the taking of a couple of portrait shots in the house and gardens. This was agreed and the conversation came to an end.

Mr Woodhouse sat and reflected. It was all most unsettling: John came from a good county family, and had he not gone off to London might well have ended up helping his brother run their small estate. He had had a perfectly good education, too; like his brother George he had gone to Marlborough, yet here he was using the language of a cockney barrow boy – if barrow boys still existed – and if cockneys still existed too. Old son! Is the Pope a Catholic? What had the Pope got to do with it? Mr Woodhouse asked himself. And of course dogs barked; did they not understand that in London?

Isabella required no persuasion to have her photograph taken. ‘In a mag?’ she shrieked. ‘He’ll put me in one of his actual mags? Are you serious?’

Mr Woodhouse realised that they were probably thinking of different magazines. He knew that Isabella liked to read glossy magazines full of ephemeral news about celebrities and their doings; he had come across these magazines left lying about the house and occasionally sneaked a look at their contents. They were absurd, of course, and the people they featured were without any interest at all – highly made-up, unhealthy-looking specimens who appeared to have no other purpose in life than to evade the paparazzi who pursued them. But occasionally the very same hounded celebrities opened their doors to admit the photographers to their homes, and the resultant features, plastered with high-definition pictures of white sofas and opulent swimming pools, gave an indication of just how little taste these people had. And yet there was a certain fascination in seeing them in their natural habitat and he had occasionally had to drop a magazine hurriedly and guiltily as a daughter came into the room. ‘Tidying,’ he would say quickly. ‘Why do you girls insist on leaving all these ridiculous magazines about the place?’

Isabella was rarely fooled. ‘What do you think of that photo of her?’ she might ask. ‘Can you believe that he actually bit her? Did you see the love-bite – it’s on her left shoulder – you can just make it out?’

‘Most unhygienic,’ he muttered. ‘A human bite can be a very toxic thing. There are numerous germs on people’s teeth.’

‘Not celebs,’ retorted Isabella. ‘A bite from a celeb is different.’

Now he was faced with something of a moral dilemma. Should he tell Isabella that the destination for her photograph was not to be some glossy gossip magazine, but Country Life, where photographs of humans are often outnumbered by photographs of horses and dogs, or sometimes of old houses?

He decided to be honest – or at least a bit honest. ‘It won’t be one of your glossy mags,’ he said. ‘It’s another magazine altogether. A bit more sedate, but still.’

He need not have worried. ‘I don’t care where it goes,’ she said. ‘It’s enough to have your photo in anything. Think what they’ll say when they see it at school. They’re all still sitting in the classroom and I’m posing! That’s seriously cool.’

‘I’m glad that you’re pleased,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘The photographer will be coming tomorrow. He’s George Knightley’s brother. You’ll remember him. He went off to London for some reason best known to himself.’

Isabella looked thoughtful. She did remember John Knightley. She remembered thinking that he was rather good-looking and had long hair when everybody else around him seemed to have his hair cut short. And he had gone to London, she thought. A London photographer is coming to do a shoot with me. With me.

While most people drove sedately up the drive that led through the parkland to Hartfield, enjoying the trees and the view of the shrubbery in the distance, John Knightley arrived at speed on a 1982 Ducati motorcycle, a throaty roar announcing him well before anybody saw the handsome Italian bike and its equally handsome rider. Mr Woodhouse went out to meet him and shook hands with the leather-clad brother of his neighbour.