And that’s it – ‘Where’s my spurtle?’ ‘In the sink’ – that’s the extent of our communication for the day, until Pierre will wander into the kitchen and find me listening to The Archers and making supper, still doing.

Pierre doesn’t say anything but runs the spurtle under the tap.

I don’t say anything as, according to Pierre, I am not more efficient and productive than he is, only more bossy. He also says that his slobbishness is his way of challenging my ‘female domestic domination’, and the only way he can leave his mark on the house is by making it untidy and dirty and leaving his spoor on my wiped surfaces.

I merely bear silent witness, with the same expression as a female war reporter in a conflict zone, as he hacks at the loaf of brown bread that sits on a board on the beech worktop and note that he is efficiently spraying crumbs in a radius of about two feet.

And then, as I’m wondering whether a controlled explosion would have done a better job of distributing crumbs around the kitchen, he toasts the bread, and then butters it without using a side-plate, then takes huge bites standing up while trailing around, something comes unbidden into my mind, these awful words:

‘My marriage is over.’

I force myself to swallow the words down again, but I do decide… something.

Thank God Jesse Marlon comes, shortly after Pierre has sloped back to the shed with a copy of today’s Independent.

He’ll be gone for hours, because he said he was heading for the studio, but before that he has to call in at the privy. Pierre is inordinately proud of his privy, and I’m all in favour too, though not because it’s green, but because it helps to keep Pierre out of the house, where his main occupation is creating mess, disturbing my tableaux and demanding to know where he’s left critical items such as some special fossil, or a bird’s egg, just when I am in the middle of making my special summer spiced chutney for the fête.

All my friends adore him, of course, but he has the management skills of a border terrier puppy, has lost all his drive or ambition and once asked whether ‘work–life balance’ was a sort of low-calorie yoghurt. He put up a pretence of working while Ceci was a baby, largely in order not to be saddled with childcare duties best left to Mother but, as soon as I was back at work, he put his feet up again.

When I look at Pierre, the awful thing is I no longer see his weatherbeaten brown face, glowing and healthy and tanned from tramping the hills, the crinkles around his blue eyes, the well-shaped bow of his wide upper lip. I no longer notice the attributes that Mimi, with fresh eyes, declared she found handsome.

My heart no longer skips a beat when I see his big, beautiful sculptor’s hands, or his bum in old jeans, as it always used to. I just think, ‘Why was I moronic enough to marry an artist?’