From the outside, the second house looked like a Victorian cottage. Lacework, verandah, weatherboards. I’ll admit it: I was charmed.

‘An original,’ Cilla said. ‘1860.’

I took in the lion’s-head knocker, the bottle-green paint on the door. This was more like it, I thought. A country house that looked like a country house.

I thought it would be cosy inside, quaint. But standing in the hallway was like standing in a tunnel. It was dark, and narrow. There was a bright light coming from the back of the house, which was further away, much further, than I expected.

My eyes adjusted. I saw that the hallway was carpeted, and lined with waist-high pine panelling stained an oily yellow.

There were two bedrooms either side. I stepped into one of them. A wall hanging read Live, laugh, love, in a variety of life-affirming fonts. The quilt cover was patterned with gerberas. Even I could tell that the Victorian decor – the lamps, the bedframe, the standing mirror – were cheap reproductions.

The oily panelling that began in the hallway went all through the house – into the kitchen, the dining room, and through to the cavernous extension, where it spread into the third bedroom and the huge, sunken living room.

‘This property has so much potential,’ said Cilla in her mock-baby’s voice.

I swallowed. The place made me feel like I was sinking. Like if I let my head slip below the level of that cheap yellow panelling, I might never resurface.

‘I don’t like the smell,’ said Pete.

Cilla lifted her nose in the air. I saw her nostrils pulse and wondered whether she was flaring them on purpose.

‘I don’t smell anything,’ she said.

I was glad to get outside.

I breathed deeply, took in the smell of cut grass. An image arose in my mind’s eye: of my younger self, dodging and weaving on the lacrosse pitch. My long socks a blur, soaked through with Saturday morning dew, the wet red so dark it was almost black. I’d loved those mornings. I loved walking onto the turf swinging my stick, feeling it slice the air. I even loved the stale dryness of my mouthguard, freed after days sitting unwashed in its box.

I took another deep breath and then another. A pang of something like grief hit me. I had been good at that game. Really good. I had to hang onto that thought. And if I’d never reached my potential, at least no-one could say it was my fault. No-one could say I hadn’t worked hard. No-one could say I wasn’t good enough.

We didn’t even go into the third house. When Pete pulled up outside it – a tidy, priced-to-sell brick-veneer – and saw that the houses on either side were taller, newer, casting shadows on the dry, pale lawn, he just kept driving.