“Well done,” I said cheerfully, giving her fifty pounds for her ten-pound place bet on number eleven.

“Thank you,” she replied, blushing slightly again. “My first win of the day.”

“Would you like to use it to make another bet?” I asked, pointing at the cash in her hand.

“Oh no,” she said in mock shock. “My boyfriend says I should always keep my winnings.”

“Very wise,” I said through gritted teeth.

Damn boyfriend!

The last two races on Royal Ascot Saturday have a distinct “end of term” feel about them. The very last race of the day, the Queen Alexandra Stakes, is the longest flat race in the United Kingdom, at more than two and a half miles, often attracting horses that normally run over the jumps. After the excitement of the Golden Jubilee and the Wokingham Stakes, which were both frantic six-furlong sprints, I always felt that the more sedate pace of the longer events was a slightly disappointing end to the meeting.

Betting was also light as punters drifted away either to beat the race traffic, to have some tea and scones or to sup a last glass of champagne in the bars. The betting ring was not exactly deserted, but the men with the earpieces were now a fairly large proportion of those remaining. They wandered around aimlessly, waiting for something untoward to happen.

It didn’t.

The day fizzled out. The Queen went home to Windsor Castle, and Royal Ascot was over for another year.

Perhaps I wouldn’t come back next year. Or maybe I would.

I spent most of Sunday with Sophie.

It was a lovely summer’s day, and we went for a walk in the hospital grounds. She had improved so much over the past five or six weeks, and I was really hopeful that she would be able to come home very soon.

“Another couple of weeks,” the doctor had said to me when I arrived.

They were always saying “another couple of weeks.” It was as if they were afraid to make the decision to send her home just in case she had a relapse and then they would be blamed for discharging her too soon.

We walked around a small pond set beneath the overhanging branches of a great oak tree. The mental hospital had been created by transforming a minor stately home that had been bequeathed to the nation by someone in lieu of inheritance tax. The building had been greatly changed from its former glory, but the grounds somehow remained rather grand even though the formal flower beds had long ago been converted into simple lawn, more easily cut by tractor mower. The calm tranquillity of the gardens was meant to do the patients good, and the high, supposedly escapeproof wire perimeter fence was out of sight, well screened behind trees. To be fair, the fence was there more to give the local residents a sense of security than to imprison the patients. Those cared for at this facility were placed in secure accommodation for their own safety, not because they posed a risk to others.

Broadmoor, it was not.

“Did you have a good week at Ascot?” Sophie asked as we sat on a bench by the pond.

“Yes,” I said. “A very good week.”

I still hadn’t said anything to her about the events of the previous Tuesday, and maybe I never would.

“There was all sorts of excitement yesterday,” I said. “Someone managed to turn both the Internet and the mobile phones off. The big companies were having a fit.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said, smiling warmly at the thought. Sophie knew all about bookmaking. She had stood next to my grandfather and me as our assistant throughout our courtship and well into our marriage.

When Sophie smiled, the sun still came out in my heart.

I took her hand in mine.

“Oh, Ned,” she sighed. “I hate this existence. I hate being here. The other residents are all bonkers, and I feel I don’t fit in.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “When can I come home?”

“Soon, my love, I promise,” I said. “The doctors say just another couple of weeks.”

“They always say that,” she said with resignation.

“You don’t want to go home too soon and then have to come back, now do you?” I said, squeezing her hand in mine.

“I never want to come back here,” she said bluntly. “I’m absolutely determined this time not to become ill again.”

She had said it before, many times before. If being well was simply a matter of want and willpower, she would be fine forever. Free choice had about as much chance of curing manic depression as a sheet of rice paper had at stopping a runaway train.

“I know,” I said calmly. “I don’t want you to have to come back here either.”

It was a major step forward in her recovery that she even recognized that she had been ill in the first place. For me, one of the most distressing things about her condition was that when she was manically high or depressively deep, she couldn’t appreciate that her bizarre, occasionally outlandish behavior was in any way unusual.

“Come on,” I said, breaking the morbidity of the moment, “let’s go and have some lunch.”

We walked hand in hand back up the expansive lawn towards the house.

“I love you,” Sophie said.

“Good,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “Most husbands would have run away by now.”

Wow, I thought, she really is nearly better. For the time being anyway.

“I haven’t been much of a wife, have I?” she said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “You’ve been the best wife I’ve ever had.”

She laughed. We laughed together.

“I will really try this time,” she said.

I knew she would. She really tried every time. But chemical imbalance in the brain couldn’t be cured by trying alone.

“They have some new drugs now,” I said. “We’ll just have to see how they do.”

“I hate them,” she said. “They make me feel sick.”

“I know, my love. But feeling sick for a bit is surely better than having to come back here.”

We walked in silence up across the terrace, the sound of our shoes on the gravel unnaturally loud in the still air.

“And they make me fat,” she said.

We made our way back into the building through the French doors of the patients’ dayroom. What must have once been a spectacular salon, with great works of art and crystal chandeliers, was now a rather dull blue-vinyl-floored utilitarian open space. It was filled with functional but uninspiring National Heath Service furniture and lit by rows of fluorescent tubes hanging down on dusty chains from a superb ornamental-plastered ceiling far above. Such sacrilege.

Sophie and I sat down at one of the small square tables, on chairs that were so uncomfortable they must have been designed by a retired torturer.

Overall, the staff were very good with the patients’ families, encouraging us to spend as much time as possible at the hospital. There was even a guest suite for relatives to stay overnight, and Sophie and I were not the only family group sitting down to a Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the dayroom. More comfortable chairs, I thought, would have helped.

“Please, can I come home for next weekend?” she asked me.

“Darling, you know it’s up to the doctors,” I said. “I promise you I’ll ask them later.”

We ate our meal mostly in silence.

The only topic Sophie wanted to talk about was going home, and I had just put the stoppers on that. But it was up to the doctors and not up to me. Patients in secure mental health accommodation could be released back into the community only on the say-so of a consultant psychiatrist and by agreement of a relevant “Care Programme Approach Review,” involving someone called the “Responsible Medical Officer,” as well as the appropriate “Mental Health Care Coordinator.” If they thought she needed two more weeks in the secure unit, then two more weeks it would be, however much I might want her home right now.