Three of us on our way to visit Henry Moore's house which has recently been opened to the public. It's the ex-wife club plus one - a single friend who has been working the personals in her search for true love, or at least truish liking.
'What are the chances of us meeting single men at this place?' she says from behind the Guardian in the back seat where she has been banished like a teenager because, since she cleverly can't drive, neither can she navigate.
I think, unlike us, they're pretty slim, but add that frankly I'm not sure that I would want to go out with a man I met wandering round a sculpture park on a Saturday afternoon in Hertfordshire with his two single friends.
'Yes, they'd probably be gay. would they?' she muses. 'But it's interesting. What you're really saying that you don't want to meet someone like yourself.'
It's true. But it's not the Groucho Marx thing of not wanting to be in a club that would have me as a member, rather it's more that, I'm not really looking for a male equivalent of myself. I live with me and I'm already bored with myself - why would I want multiply knowing the answers to all my own questions by two?
The other ex-wife used to bemoan the fact that her former husband never wanted to do the same sort of things that she did - like visit museums or galleries, while mine was as interested as I was in such places and would have loved the Henry Moore sculptures. We often did such things together but the idea of running into his replacement with two of his mates out on earnest cultural pursuits isn't up there with a 'great sense of humour' on my list of must haves.
Secretly, or okay, since I'm writing it here, not that secretly, my heart sinks like a bar of soap in a very deep bath at the thought of spending the rest of my life trailing round exhibitions, stately homes and gardens with my girlfriends like I'm on a WRVS day out. Much worse to be sitting at home knitting twin sets for my cats, or indeed, even to have cats, of course, and yes, yes, yes, how lucky to have friends who will bear my company long enough to actually get in a car with me for a long journey in which there may be singing, but still...
I can't quash the feeling I should be wearing a pair of white gloves and a hat.
This isn't helped by the fact that my single friend around town is wearing a very pretty silk tea dress with a net underskirt and a cream duster coat, and I'm in a geometric print 'wiggle dress' and have my mother's pearl brooch pinned on to my lapel.
'You do realise that we are only three corgis and a pug short of being in a PG Wodehouse novel?' I mutter as we trailed round Henry Moore's house listening to the guide tell us that 'he got given a lot of fings by people who visited him.'
'The ex's parents have a Henry Moore drawing,' I whisper. They bought it in the 1950s - apparently they came here and met him.' I had a momentary vision of a younger version of my diminutive mother-in-law perched on a sofa in the sitting room surrounded by 'fings' having just spent a month's salary on a small brown drawing. It's probably one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my life and now hangs behind the door of their dining room so that it is hidden from sight, both from thieves, and guests, as she also shuddered with dislike every time she looked at it. It's a shame we've split up. I was so looking forward to inheriting it and selling it for a Howard Hodgkin or and Albert Irwin.
We shuffle on through the cramped, over-furnished rooms like animals on the way to the abbatoir - from the office to the dining room and into the tiny kitchenette which is so authentic that the authentic period hand towel looks like it hasn't been washed since the eighties. 'Mrs Moore didn't ever cook in this kitchen. She had a cook,' the guide informs us as we squeeze through. 'But it still has the original fridge,' she adds. Fancy - an hour and a half up the A10 to look at an original 1980s fridge that its owner probably never opened. If it had a latin name we'd be writing it in our notebooks.
'I love this one,' says Eva as we are finally released to roam around the large sculptures set in the grounds. Single friends looses the duster coat, slips on her shades and turns her face up to the sun. Eva points to a reclining (what else- with all that leisure time, no wonder his women were always lying down) figure on a small hillock in the middle of a field surrounded by sheep and suggests we try and get a little closer.
Five minutes later and we are picking our way gingerly over grass which seems to be primarily composed of sheep droppings encrusted with orange flies. Eva strides ahead while single friend and I - she in her snakeskin Emma Hope sneakers (ah - so this is the sort of women who buys the velvet baseball boots) - try to step between piles of dung.
Once beside it we gaze at it wordlessly. Or rather single friend does say something about the lack of identifiable male characteristics but it can't be repeated here on the grounds of taste.
I look on the map. There's a number 5 and a small picture with 'reclining figure' written underneath it. Well that's clear then. I can't think of anything further to add.
'Aren't the lambs cute,' says single friend and gets out her iPhone and begins to take pictures of them. We pose beside a group of reclining sheep. 'You look like Welsh farmer's wives,' says single friend. 'Ex-wives.' I reply.
My heels gets stuck in the cattle grid on the way back out of the field and I steal a glance at my watch to see how long it is until lunch. Eva has thoughtfully booked us a table at a local hostelry. I begin to dream of chips.
'You know you're right, Marion. I just can't see our three male equivalents getting excited about Henry Moore tapestries,' sighs single friend as we sit on benches and watch a film from the 50s where some women with very glossy monochrome hair try on scarves designed by Cecil Beaton with exaggerated expressions of delight, while wearing frocks that don't look too dissimilar to the ones we are wearing ourselves.
She is fiddling with her iPhone looking up film listings. 'And I bet you anything that, even if they did get excited about fabrics they wouldn't then rather sadly go and see a movie together afterwards.'
'No, but they might go down the pub,' I suggested as we pile back into the BMW with our selection of postcards and Henry Moore prints and do the manly thing ourselves, and drive off for the much anticipated lunch.
'Oh, look,' crows Eva, excitedly, as we wind past one thatched cottage after another and pull over beside The Bull Inn. 'A garden centre,' she whoops. We can have a look round later. They also have a lovely garden you can visit!' Single friend and I look at each other with trepidation, gather up armfulls of Saturday supplements and find a table outside in the beer garden - more of a beer patio really, where the waitress insists on bringing us a menu which turns out to be a three foot tall blackboard, dragged in and ostentatiously set down in a flower bed.
Eva is fingering a small brochure for a nearby stately home and murmuring something about Virginia Woolf's birthplace. 'I'd so like to see the garden. Do you think we have time?'
'What would you like to drink?' the waitress asks.
'I'll have a glass of white wine,' says single friend, rather loudly.
'Me too,' I concur.
'Large or small?' she wonders.
'LARGE!' we reply in unison, without consultation.
On the way back Eva puts on a Leonard Cohen CD.
'I listened to four hours of this on my way back from Wales yesterday,' she says.
You see, that's my point. I love the Cohen, but I definitely don't want to go out with a man who listens to four hours worth of his depressive singing in the car and who knows all the words to Suzanne. Not even after a large Sauvignon Blanc.
