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.

And then he kisses me, very slowly, and intimately, and with patience, and skill, and infinite variety, for what seems ages, while I completely lose myself in him.

Mimi

After the mandatory hour reading my way through a dog-eared stack of Dorset Lifes in the waiting room at the surgery my name is called, just as I’ve found the new Vanity Fair with an exposé of a Hollywood murder in it that looks enjoyably juicy. I lay it down, gather up my things, and go.

‘Ah, Mrs Fleming, a very good morning,’ Dr Ashburton says, not looking at me but at the morning appointments on his screen. He has the glum air of the country doctor for whom attending to patients is an unwelcome distraction from the important main business of the day, which is hunting to hounds. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asks, looking at his watch.