I can’t help it. Unlike Pierre, I cannot regard houses as machines for living in. It’s as if I suffer from a higher aesthetic sensibility, and I cannot help but arrange each room, down to the way the linen glass cloths hang just so over the Aga rail and the flowers bloom in their lustreware vases, as if they are being seen for the first time by someone else, someone very smart whom I want to impress with my own impeccable, yet effortless, taste. All the bedrooms upstairs are made up with crisp linen and plump duvets and plenty of pillows, ready for guests, with clean snowy towels lying on heated rails in the bathrooms, and boxes of unopened Roger et Gallet lily of the valley soap in cupboards. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in comfort and style. And I mind – terribly – about how things look. For instance, I do not want any coffee, not after two cups in Godminster, but I do like the sight of the glass sides of the cafetière, not to mention the roasty aroma that fills the warm kitchen when the boiling water hits the freshly ground beans.

Just as I am expecting Jesse Marlon, he comes into the kitchen, carrying his log. Damn!

Pierre’s Kilim leather-soled slippers make a shuffling noise on the wonderful slate-flagged floor, found in Brittany, as he wanders over. Then he places the log carefully on the wine rack underneath the butcher’s block, as if that is where it lives.

I look on in horror, but Pierre doesn’t seem to notice. He is completely, 100 per cent wrapped up in himself, as usual. It is as if Ceci and I do not exist. As if food appears on plates, ironed shirts in cupboards, petrol in cars, rubbish sacks in the wheelie bins – as if by magic.

He goes into the larder – slop, slop his slippers go over the floor – and takes out eggs from the marble, then bacon from the fridge. It’s so annoying the way he always eats a full English of porridge and a fried breakfast in the morning. He’s one of those men that takes all the PR about breakfast to heart, as if not to eat a plateful of fried food, even for one morning, could possibly result in what he calls ‘muesli-belt malnutrition’.

‘What’ve you done with my spurtle?’ he then asks accusingly, having peered into the earthenware jar by the Aga where I keep wooden spoons, rolling pins and spatulas, and indeed the special wooden spurtle he uses to stir his porridge. Pierre even looks into the dishwasher in the kitchen, which I intend to run later, on the intensive 75 degree programme, after my and Jesse Marlon’s coffee cups have gone in (I could wait till after supper, but it’s more than two-thirds full now).

‘It’s in the sink,’ I reply, in a sharp voice, thinking Pierre should know by now not to look there, wood should never go in the dishwasher.