When Colin Watts had sloped off, after grinding a Rothman butt carefully in the middle of my back steps, I ask Jesse Marlon why Colin had called him a ‘rancid’.

‘Because that’s what the village calls us,’ he answers. ‘Rancids.’

I see exactly why the eco-villagers might be called this, having seen them trail glumly around the village in their knitted woollen weeds and having stood a little too close to them as they stocked up on Rizlas in the Stores, but said of course that they weren’t rancid at all, what a silly thing to say, and offered to make a fresh pot of coffee for us both. I certainly needed it.

It’s not every day, after all, that the village rapist (though I have only Garry-from-the-pub’s word on that) comes to call.

And it’s certainly not every day that Jesse Marlon comes up behind me while I am fussing over the Aga (I was wiping a spill – if you don’t remove them straightaway they burn themselves in, like branding scars on to the enamel) and slowly turns me round, so I’m facing him.

He puts down his cup on the side, and then decides it should properly go in the sink, and carefully places it in the wide butler’s one, an action that – for someone used to Pierre’s slovenly ways – almost makes me come on the spot.

And then. That first touch. It’s the touch that – such a cliché, but so true – says it all. I stare at his mouth, which is wide and full, as if willing him to kiss me, and a roaring starts up in my head, as if someone is gunning an engine in a part of my brain, and it suddenly fires into life after years of sitting in an outhouse, under a mildewed tarpaulin shroud.

I don’t dare look into his eyes in case he recoils when he sees how much I want him, his youth, his adorable, poreless fresh boy-skin, how much I want to graze my lips over the faint stubble peeking through the downy baby-fluff on his cleft chin and run my hands over his lean torso unmarked by the passage of time, of boredom, of marriage and disappointment, and slip them under the frayed waistband of his battered Levi’s, and feel his hardness.

I also don’t want him to see, too close up, the laughter lines around my eyes, my deepening crinkle that almost joins my nose to my mouth, like a runnel on the surface of the moon. Facing Jesse Marlon’s own unconcerned, magnificent perfection, his own assumption of his own beauty and place in my kitchen and the universe, I feel… shy. And bloody old.

But I soon get over it.

He tips my chin, forcing me to look up at him. ‘I thought he was going to hurt you,’ he says. ‘I thought he was going to…’ Then he stops, in mid-flow, as if he’d thought better of what he was going to say, and shakes his curly dark head. My hand reaches up, and without thinking I start twiddling the curls about his ears, as if I own him already.