Mrs. Belchamber was not invited but Mrs. Belchamber came to stay. The changes she introduced into Scotty’s topsy-turvy Kentish farmhouse were past belief. But though Christopher could not help feeling some concern that he had landed on his friend a woman of character as well as three lively French children, the Belchamber influence on his own friendship with Cressida was admittedly an almost unmixed blessing.

Into the ordered life of thirty-three-year-old Edward Netherford comes the Brockman family. Loud, brash and demanding the return of three Impressionist paintings which have been retained - illegally, they claim—by their late father’s second wife. Edward’s legal services—and his even temperament - have never been more severely tested as letters to the second Mrs. Brockman in York remain ignored and unanswered. It soon becomes clear that some more positive move has to be made.

When, like Ruth and Roger Mallard, you inherit a large house but no money to keep it up, one thing you can do is turn it into a guest-house. And having made up their minds, the Mallards decided that River Lodge was to be a guest-house of the very best kind. The first week’s guests were specially chosen - or self invited: a rich aunt; a theatrical producer and the lovely Felicity; Felicity’s sister and her twins; a famous artist and the amiable “Goosey”; the fattest dog in fiction; and a not-so-rich but very comic uncle and aunt.

One day Jody was found lying at the foot of a staircase on her way to give a client a beauty treatment. When she recovered and talked of a man with a goat and a yellow-and-black front door, her brother-in-law and Charles, her fiancé, told her she was imagining things. But Jody was unconvinced, and determined to find the man she remembered, leading a small goat.

On his retirement, George Ainstey had moved to Ellstream, hoping to escape from the tensions of London life. His only neighbors were Lady Charlotte Merrion, who lived in the mansion on the site of an 18th-century ruin, and her daughter-in-law, Antonia Merrion, whose land adjoined Mr. Ainstey’s.