‘Ha!’ I bark.

I think she’s getting back at me for suggesting that Home Farm was not just in need of refreshment but in need of being dragged into the twenty-first century.

I explain that Pierre ferries Ceci to and from school, once a week, while I’m busy in Godminster with the vodka and my other range of the Dairy-label products. He does a bit of shopping.

‘Don’t forget the log – he carries his log,’ adds Mimi. Mimi annoyingly finds the log thing very funny and I am beginning to wish I had never brought it up.

I explain that though Pierre was – I mean, is – a sculptor of great gifts, Pierre’s main occupations, currently, are time-wasting and medical self-diagnosis. ‘He spends most of his time in that huge shed in the garden, the studio. He makes cups of tea, listens to the radio, birdwatches, reads the Independent and the Art Newspaper and all his boring magazines, checks his latest symptoms in his massive Dictionary of Medical Symptoms. But what he doesn’t do, Mimi, is earn money.’

I spare her the fact that he uses a sort of outdoor privy, over a trench, on occasion, in order to avoid coming into the house and risk being given a chore by me. He claims ‘it’ disperses into a reed bed, a claim that no one, let alone me, has ever sought to disprove.

‘Oh God, I’m sure that’s what Ralph thinks about me,’ Mimi replies. ‘I haven’t really got my act together yet. Everything takes so long. Just having three meals a day and keeping warm and reasonably clean – me, that is, not the house – is a full-time job. There literally isn’t any time at all!’

‘Well, it does take a while to find one’s feet, I agree,’ I admit. ‘It’s taken me ten years, and you’ve only been here, what, a year and a bit.’

‘Anyway, I think Pierre is charm itself,’ Mimi tells me. ‘He’s soooo good-looking! Sort of teddy-bearish, all rumply, and he’s still got masses of lovely tufty hair. I love brown hair. It’s terribly underrated, don’t you think? Thank God Ralph hasn’t lost his either! And I like the way he does that funny walk in his slippers to make the girls laugh, with his feet turned out, like a penguin…’

I am a bit sharp with Mimi at this point.

‘I’d be very good-looking too if I had never had any stress of any kind in my entire adult life,’ I snap. ‘I’d look ten years younger than I do if I was being kept by someone else, without working or exerting myself in any way. And, anyway, that’s not a funny walk, it’s how Pierre walks.’

At this point I am sorely tempted to tell Mimi about Jesse Marlon. I’m longing to tell someone.

Jesse Marlon Bryanston – the son of Ned, but not the son of Lulu – he’s started coming up to the Dairy to help out. It’s become our little routine. But I don’t tell her. After he’s done his chores at Spodden’s Hatch – he is a little vague about them, but slug clearance seems to feature quite a lot – he’s up to the Dairy quite often, if it’s not a ‘communal work day’, when they all do horrible jobs like moving compost heaps or stripping down the steam engine that cuts all the trees into planks and oiling all the moving parts.