‘As far as I’m aware. They were here when we bought the place, and that was a long time ago.’ She’s frowning, thinking about it, as if she’s trying to pin down the date precisely. She raises a finger. A new thought. ‘We added the handrail in the bathroom.’

She watches to see if I write it down, so I do.

‘And the shed outside? Should we take a look at it?’

‘Hmmm.’ She glances past me, in its general direction. ‘I’m not sure it’s . . . Do we need to for the purposes of the appraisal? It’s far from tidy. I hadn’t anticipated . . . It’s a simple twenty-by-thirty-foot workshop. Walter and I had it built in 2002.’

‘Power? Water? Bathroom out there?’ Just the facts. Avoid her sudden reluctance and get us back on firm ground where hands can be shaken on a deal and real estate can be sold.

‘Power and water but no bathroom.’ She nods in a businesslike way. ‘Storage and work benches. It gave us the bedrooms back. All our things were everywhere before that. It got so we could barely open the doors to the spare rooms upstairs.’

‘And, as a bonus, that’s already a positive step towards putting a house on the market. Bedrooms you can’t walk into are not a selling point.’

She laughs. It’s mostly politeness. ‘Your accent,’ she says. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Australia.’ It doesn’t usually help the conversation to say Brisbane. Australia is enough. ‘I’ve lived here a few years. Permanently, anyway. I was here on and off before that.’

‘I’m not from here either,’ she tells me. ‘Not originally. Not Alaska, anyway. Walter and I came from the East Coast.’ She nods in the direction of a bookcase, which has a row of framed photos on one shelf. ‘That’s Walter. He passed six months ago.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ The standard American line goes, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but it’s taken on an automaticity I don’t like. It’s a reflex now, most times it’s used. I can’t do it.

‘That’s us in Pompeii.’ She takes two steps towards the bookcase and picks up one of the larger photos.

It’s from the nineties, at a guess. Ellen is wearing white slacks and sandals and a floral top while Walter, already old, has an olive blazer, khaki pants and a camera around his neck. He has a stoop and his hair is drawn in strands across a scalp that is getting more sun than it should. They are both beaming. Behind them, the ruins arrange themselves as ruins should, a grooved column, an ochre-coloured archway, walls meeting at right angles for purposes now long gone and, beyond them all, the hazy shape of the mountain, sleeping the sleep of the innocent.