Honeyborne is sparkling in the weak sunlight, even the bilious sign offering Morning Coffee, Light Bites and Sunday Roasts – as if Starbucks, wheat intolerance and the revulsion against methane and red meat belonged to another era – outside the crazily timbered Lamb Inn. The thatch-fringed cottages set in the plunging declivity of a plump green valley gleam, as if freshly painted for Ana’s arrival. Today, even the tarmac on the roads through the village that segue Honeyborne to Larcombe and Chesilborne and thence to Godminster is glossy, as if recently bootblacked by a SWAT team of shoeshine boys. I turn into the drive and see our own Home Farm, set on the green hill, through her eyes, looking sweet-faced and chocolate-boxy.

I glance at her again. She is very skinny, with long straight brown hair, and wearing tight jeans and high heels and a white anorak with fake fur around the hood.

I can’t help saying something about the shoes. ‘Didn’t my husband explain that there aren’t pavements, Ana?’ I say. ‘Apart from in towns? It’s not really a high heels kind of place, you might fall over.’

‘Yes?’ Ana says, with a rising inflection, as if she’s been watching too much cable TV, edging away from Calypso, who was trying to make friends.

But she doesn’t seem to understand. Though she is quite self-possessed. She doesn’t seem to be appalled when we reach Home Farm, which is a relief, and actually smiles when she presents me with a house present of a three-foot-long skinny salami that looks exactly like the bull’s pizzles they sell in Horse Supplies. I exclaim with delight and hide it on a high shelf in the larder in case the children find it and get scared, or Mirabel brings it out and tries to frighten Posy with it.

I offer her tea, then coffee, but she says she doesn’t drink either tea or coffee. I feel this is a somewhat lowering development. I’ve never been friends with anyone I. who doesn’t need industrial-strength jags of coffee before they can face the day or 2. doesn’t like dogs.

‘So, are you hungry?’ I try next, in a bright voice. ‘I’m going to have to get the children from school in an hour or so. Did you have anything on the train, or did you get something at the station? I always have the cinnamon bagel with cream cheese at the Bagel Buffet, and a double-shot large latte, and take it with me on the train, as a treat,’ I babble. Ana looks at me without understanding.

‘Yes?’ she says.

‘I know,’ I say, desperately, deciding in that moment that she is not a candidate for nightly candlelit dinner à trois with me and Ralph. ‘The children eat at 6.30 p.m., you might want something by then, I think I’ll give them peas and lasagne tonight. Why don’t you settle in, and unpack?’

Which is where she is now. Upstairs, tramping about. I remove the lasagne from the freezer and put it by the Aga to defrost, and try to decide what I’m feeling about this latest development.