As I ponder Miss Hahn’s tactile dexterity, Mrs Meadows is quietly and methodically relieving me with her hand. I couldn’t say that this was a bolt from the blue – no … – but it certainly wasn’t inked in on my morning’s itinerary. The jury is still out as to whether a bout of somewhat mechanically administered hand-relief is actually an appropriate response to the candid expression of feelings of profound loss, sorrow and grief.

(Okay, so half of the jury are now in, and they’re all lolling around in the box grinning like a bunch of idiots.) Although (I’ll be frank – you deserve that at the very least) the feelings (of sadness etc., that awful, hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach) aren’t nearly so profound now – now that I have been made the chief (fine, the only!) beneficiary of Kimberly’s small estate. I feel light-headed, almost. Yes. Very odd.

Of course silly, frumpy Miss Hahn (newly shelled walnuts, washed gravel, a field mushroom lightly frying in sunflower oil) can have no concept (none!) of what a weight of responsibility this inheritance may ultimately prove to be. I mean there’s Trudy (Kimberly’s mother) to be considered (her declining mental health was the main, contributing factor towards the photos’ publication in the first place). Trudy was always (in my view) quite doolally – completely bats; cranky, dotty, dizzy. An artisan, she turned up at our wedding shoeless, in a home-made goat-skin dress. Followed a strict raw food diet for seventeen years. Hasn’t washed her hair for over two decades (hair is designed to ‘self-clean’, apparently). Thinks coffee is a kind of poison. Once tried to knit a hat for her dog (a basset) out of spider’s webs.

Dear old Trudy.

And now this is all my problem? Now just hang on a second … I have seven recovering drug addicts with their terrifyingly large and touchingly hopeful Catholic families in tow jamming up my workshop in Monterrey, being taught wood-carving, hide tanning and – ha! – life skills by another recovering drug addict called Honesto Soto Salazar (who is anything but), while his loyal wife Juana, my housekeeper, plays her part, training the other wives to hand-weave classic long silk rebozos with their spectacularly tasselled fringes at the far end of my back porch. All these honourable endeavours are supported by an astronomical bank loan (mine, of course).

I suppose I should just sell the house (which Kimberly no longer needs, obviously) and use the proceeds to set up Trudy in a care home (but who would be willing to take her?). Unload those infernal photos to the highest bidder and damn the consequences. This isn’t what Kimberly wanted, no, but then this isn’t what I want. By ‘this’ I mean to be here. Back in England. East Sussex. Rye. Lamb House. The beneficiary of a brief, unasked-for interlude of hand-relief from Mrs Sage Meadows (widow) (poet) (gardener) (chef).

Now I come to ponder it, that breakfast was alarmingly high in iron and protein. Eggs Benedict followed by fried liver, kidney and bacon? One might almost think Mrs Meadows was priming me for something.