Now he found himself on Saturday mornings padding through tracks in the forest with the new dog she had also arranged because, she said, it would get them out. Dog owners, she said, chat to each other. It will help us integrate. Not acknowledging that integration was beyond him; that despite the move, perhaps partially because of the move, he was disintegrating even faster than in London. Flora’s ghosts were smoking angrily on the back step, refusing to come in because it was hers, Jules’s; they were swearing under his breath, It’s a bit fucking green, isn’t it? These were the Floras he was making up to fill her absence. He knew the real Flora was in London, disintegrating herself as the new owners stripped the staircase back to bare wood, replaced the kitchen lino with modern flagstones. Her favoured chair had been eBayed. Even now, Flora’s last skin cells were being damp-clothed from windowsills.

The Floras he invented to keep him company were fractious, resentful. There’s nothing to do round here. A six-year-old Flora: But I want to go to our playground. The one with the rocking lion. We’re miles away, Daddy, MILES AWAY.

Work was also, dangerously, miles away. He could write reports at home but the longer journeys to his London office left his head trespassing on the shoulders of strangers, his mind accidentally boarding trains of thought that were hurtling, driverless, into the dark.

Jules was left to steer them through a pretended normality. She would pick him up from the station on a stream of chatter that gave misery no elbow room and drive him overcautiously back to the place she insisted was home. In his head, it was still The Brockenhurst House. London was home and he’d given his key to a stranger. The Brockenhurst House, wood inside, wood out, pine, ash and oak, smelt like a coffin. It was the place Flora wasn’t, and hadn’t ever been. The name of the village – had Jules not noticed: broken, hearse? – was the only quiet echo of his loss.

It was a family house without a family. They had a second reception and received no one. They had four bedrooms when they would only sleep in one; two if they argued. There was a bathroom each and one for the cat.

When he noticed the pulley the previous owner erected for hoisting their canoe out of the way in the garage, his ears began ringing. They rang as loudly as the TV stations of his childhood sang after shutdown; the same note, the note you’d wake to. This house could be the end of him.

When night fell, you knew it. No protective sodium glow to dim the pitiless shining of stars, the same points of light that had glittered over breathing, digesting, dinosaurs.

I am completely alone, he said to himself in bed.

His wife clicked her teeth beside him.