There are nights, too, when even I feel strange and displaced, when I fall prey to sudden bouts of cabin fever and find myself standing at the window, staring out at the nothingness beyond as if my missing social life might suddenly drive into the town in the form of friends scrunched together in the back of the butterscotch truck, bearing videos of movies, theatre reviews, and prints of photographic exhibitions I’d missed. But there is nothing out there, just stars and darkness and silence. I open the window and breathe it all in, go on breathing until I think my insides might freeze. Then I go upstairs and sit on the children’s beds and watch them sleeping, put my hand on their chests, because there are times when you need absolutes, things you can count on, like their innocence and sweetness. As for loneliness – well, for all the exoticness of sleeping by myself, there are nights when I miss a man in my bed.

So as the barking continues outside and I look at the longing on their faces I’m overcome with a crippling sense of guilt and, against all better judgement, open the door to the stormy night. The creature stalks in and sniffs the air, clearly offended at the amount of time it’s been kept waiting. It turns and stares right at Emmy as though sizing up how much of her face to take off with the first lunge.

Emmy presses herself against my legs. ‘Mummy,’ she breathes, ‘it is a wolf!’ and she’s not far off the mark. A strange-looking animal, half cattle dog, half Hound of the Baskervilles with a meaty stub of a docked tail and different colour eyes.

‘Here, boy, here.’ Jack holds out his hand. The dog growls and bares a set of thin frighteningly sharp teeth.

‘Don’t touch it,’ I snap. Herding the children behind me, I swing the door back open.

‘Here, boy, come on, out you go. Go on now. Out!’

‘No,’ the children shriek in unison.

The dog pays absolutely no attention to any one of us. It sniffs its way round the kitchen, eats two of Emmy’s cheese doodles with their accompanying bugs and dust off the floorboards, then, folding its shaggy legs beneath its body, flops down under the table, throwing a quick challenging look in our direction.

And there it stays.

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