We are doing quite a lot of staring moodily at each other at the moment, in the barns, or in the kitchen, while Pierre, of course, notices nothing, being completely wrapped up in himself and even seems to think Jesse Marlon might welcome news of some minor digestive complaint, or the fact that a new delivery of stone has arrived, and that Pierre is exploring in his work the possibilities of ‘making body into sky’.

We’d been shifting some boxes earlier, before Mimi called.

JM mentioned he’d seen Prime, this movie about how Uma Thurman starts dating a man in his twenties.

‘Oh, is that on in Godminster?’ I’d asked, my antennae twitching. ‘But I thought that came out a while ago.’

‘No, saw the DVD,’ he replied. I was on my knees, pinning up my thick skeins of brown hair, which was falling into my eyes as we crouched over the fruit laid out on the barn floor for the chutney, chucking out bad apples into a crate. My tweed pencil skirt had ridden quite far up my thighs, as I thought it might. ‘I didn’t quite get it, the concept, the pitch or whatever,’ said Jesse Marlon. ‘It was supposed to be, like, transgressive because the guy’s in his twenties. But she’s a total hottie in her thirties. That’s not what I call transgressive.’ He gave me a lazy look, which left me slightly flustered. ‘Young guy. Uma Thurman. What’s not to like?’

Then he did a very poor imitation of Uma Thurman: ‘But I’ve got T-shirts older than you!’ he squeaked, chucking a rotten russet into the bad apple bucket with a flick of his wrist.

‘I didn’t think you had electricity at Spodden’s Hatch,’ I’d said. ‘Let alone a DVD player or home cinema or whatever.’

Jesse Marlon has often described the eco-village’s alternative, low-impact lifestyle to me in detail and, from what I gather, it’s all very extreme and Amish. No fossil fuels or internal combustion engines are used, so they scythe rather than strim, the self-built houses on the site are thatched with self-grown wheat, and they eat only what they grow themselves, apart from grains and nuts which come from a bulk organic distributor; even the milk and yoghurt come from Lazy and Daisy, Spodden’s milkers. There’s even talk of a biomass boiler.

‘We don’t,’ he replied shortly. ‘Watched it at Court Place. In the media room.’

I tried not to feel slighted, but I did, just at the mention of Court Place. Apart from Hutton and Godminster Hall, Court Place is the other big spread around here, probably 1000 acres, and it’s owned by Cath and Granville Cobb. It’s exactly down to the last particular how you would imagine a spread owned and run by an American dynamo married to a British hedge funder to be; it has wonderful plumbing, clockwork catering, manicured grounds, and yet no mud or pee stains on the carpets. As Pierre noted, after one of Cath’s Lawn Meets, Court Place is a perfect Anglo-American country house in that it fuses the best aspects of both cultures. It’s half a mile outside the village, the Lar runs through the place, and it’s lapped in luxury, but not in an offensively plutocratic way.