At half past four Molly arrived, elegant as usual, to see if there was anything she could do.

Thea would have fallen on her neck in gratitude if she hadn’t been so filthy. ‘Take this lot away,’ she pleaded quietly, so ‘this lot’ wouldn’t hear. ‘They’ve been wonderful, but they can’t agree what music to play, and there’s nothing more they can do apart from painting and I don’t want them doing that – they’re art students.’

Molly’s estate managed to fit in Petal and the sound system, as well as the four who had come in it originally. Thea watched them drive past the window, waving madly, with a sigh of relief. They were nice kids. Two of them lived with her, one of them was Petal’s boyfriend and one, a girl, was attached to another of her lodgers, but Thea had had enough young company. She wanted to have the place to herself, some calm, to give herself a rough idea how long it would take to get it into some sort of order. She couldn’t do that with drum’n’bass beating in her ears at full volume. She only liked drum’n’bass through a couple of closed doors. Then it was fine.

The carpet was gone. The floor beneath washed, but otherwise in a bad way. She would have to hire a sander to get through the layers of dirt and stain. Then it would need lots and lots of coats of varnish. She’d have to find something that was fairly quick-drying.

Downstairs, in the basement room, they discovered the carpet was glued down. Thea had stopped them pulling it up until she found out if the glue would come off easily. She didn’t want people sticking to the floor, after all. The corner where they tried this indicated that only laborious scrubbing with a paint scraper would remove it, and with the prospect of varnishing the floor upstairs for days on end ahead of her, she decided to think of a plan B for the basement floor.

Now she was on her own she prowled around, exploring her territory. It felt good. It was still spacious and light, lighter without the carpet, and to her surprise it already felt like her space and she was happy to be there on her own.