The door between the scullery and the kitchen is closed. She ties Baxter’s lead to a hook beside the back door and lifts the grocery bags onto the scullery worktop. The long, narrow room is now sporting a variety of cooking appliances. A slow cooker had arrived from Fiona two weeks ago, and judging by the smell of spices in the room, it’s already being put to good use. Tess opens the door to the kitchen and is faced with a scene of destruction. The only furniture left in the room is the kitchen table and the built-in dresser opposite the window. Everything else has been moved out, or disposed of. Various wires with brightly coloured insulating tape over their ends protrude from the wall. The table has been covered with dust sheets to protect it. Someone has embedded a claw hammer in the wall below the mantelpiece.

In the middle of the chaos, Georgia is dancing with a slim, white-haired man. He is holding her close and they are doing a very small on-the-spot shuffle. The radio is playing jazz so loudly that they don’t hear her come in.

The man stops dancing suddenly when he sees her. ‘You must be Tess,’ he shouts over the music.

Georgia turns the radio down. ‘Stan, this is Tess. Tess, this is Stan.’ She looks around at the bare floorboards and hammer-pocked walls. ‘We got a little carried away.’

Shouldn’t Stan be up the west coast somewhere, with his sick wife? Tess thinks, before she can stop herself.

‘Look!’ Georgia points at a widening hole in the plaster. ‘You can see the range properly now. I thought it might be rusted away to nothing but it’s still there.’

‘It must have had a good clean and some black lead before it was boarded up,’ says Stan, ‘and the room is dry, or it was until that pipe burst, so that will have helped too.’

Tess peers through the gap. ‘It’s huge.’

‘It is indeed.’ Georgia rubs her forehead, leaving a white plaster-dust trail. ‘And it made the best Yorkshire puddings you’ve ever had.’

‘What are you going to do? Cover it back up?’

‘Not at all. It’s been hidden away for fifty years and I want to see it again. It was Annie who was fed up with it and wanted some modern conveniences.’

‘Is it usable?’ Tess has a vague memory of her nana talking about making treacle toffee on the range in the house where she grew up.

‘I’m not sure. Not with the coal we used to get, that’s for sure. What do you think, Stan?’