‘Of course you can.’ She lays a hand on my arm. ‘Coming from London an’ all, but out here it’s real hard to find people who appreciate good taste.’ She glances across the room to where the other wives are sitting and drops her voice even lower. ‘They do their best, ‘course, but I guess they just lack the . . .’ she gropes for the right word, ‘well you know . . . the sophistication.’

The sculptures are ugly and pretentious and in keeping with the rest of the house, through which I’ve just been led on a painfully intimate tour, encouraged at every opportunity to be touchy-feely with a variety of objects from the scalloped bound edges of the apricot towels to the gold taps on the matching Jacuzzi. Worse, the entire thing had been punctuated by a loud roaring as the Hogan teenagers circled the house on quad bikes like latter-day Indian braves rousting a covered wagon.

‘Tucker and Cody,’ Helen had mused, ‘why, if it’s not the quads, it’s the snowmobiles. Jeff bought ’em horses, but the boys took one look and said, “Ma, if those things ain’t got an engine, we don’t want to ride ’em.” Teenagers, huh? But then I guess you got all that still to come.’

I’d clucked something empathetic, cursing myself for caving in to Robert’s pressure and accepting a tea date with the Texas Family Hogan.

Back in the main room we join the wives of Jeff’s two business partners, who are crouching underneath a massive chandelier constructed from intertwined antlers and hooves and suspended from the ceiling by a thick brass chain. Everything in this house is equally super-sized. The chocolate chip cookies which Helen is now pressing upon the women are too big for the plate, the studded red-leather sofa on which they’re sitting is too big for the room, and the room itself, too big for the house.

Jeff Hogan’s ‘ranch’ is 10,000 feet of new-build vertical log home. ‘Finished only this summer, and quite our dream project,’ Hogan had said, although one might imagine a little less dreamy for the two building companies he boasted of putting out of business during its construction.

‘The landscape artist comes from California,’ Helen is still puffing up to the wives, ‘so she has that “big picture” mentality but then Ague is still such a small town, isn’t it?’ She points through the window at some cabbagy-looking shrubs. ‘She landscaped the whole of our garden with native desert vegetation. They attract these big ol’ colourful butterflies in the spring.’

‘God sure has blessed Arizona with extremely di-verse landscapes and creatures,’ one of the wives whispers and I look through the window, wondering how on earth to escape.