Silk chiffon top, satin skirt, strass- and pearl-embellished satin belt, all Chanel. White gold and diamond earrings, from a selection, Chanel Fine Jewellery. Photography: Boo George for Harper’s BAZAAR

The couple lost friends to Covid-19, and Knightley has had to juggle home-schooling Edie, and taking care of the toddler, Delilah. Food also seems to have been a particular source of domestic tension over the past year. Righton, says his spouse, is “quite extreme, vaguely OCD – it’s what makes him a really good cook.” Having read a slew of environmental books over the first lockdown, he decided that the whole family should eat only vegetables sourced from regenerative farms during the second. “But I’m not a big root-veg fan, and in these regenerative boxes we were getting – this is so middle-class, I can’t bear it – there were four celeriac. And I hate celeriac! I didn’t realise I could feel so strongly about a vegetable…” When Righton offered to whip one up for supper, in place of a much-longed-for takeaway, she lost her temper and threw it at the kitchen floor – “it made quite a thunk.” The week we meet, she admits to having had another wobble at the thought of a second lockdown birthday. “I ended up sounding like a five-year-old, saying ‘But I want to see my friends.’ And my actual five-year-old gave me a big hug…”

So she is greatly looking forward to the world opening up again, not least because she can restart her career. “I haven’t worked for a year,’ she says, as we settle with our coffees onto a bench outside the local school. “I had just finished filming Silent Night in London on
a Wednesday and we went into lockdown on Friday.” That was also the day that Misbehaviour, a drama about the women activists who disrupted the 1970 Miss World contest, was meant to come out. “I saw my face stuck up on a poster for it, and I thought, ‘Oh dear, that nearly happened…’ Then I was meant to be doing a TV show in September for four or five months, but I couldn’t make it work with lockdowns and childcare. I was very lucky to be able, financially, to make that decision, so it felt like it was a choice, but it was a crap choice.”