A couple in their early sixties come down the path. They are both short and rotund, both wearing heavy coats and glasses. The young man steps towards them and shakes their hands, pumping them up and down with a vigour that slightly destabilises each of them in turn. ‘Hello, hello!’ he says, as he gestures with a wide motion, back down the path to where the front door stands open.

‘Well well well …’ says the young man, as they step inside the door. All three of them wipe their feet on the mat with what strikes me as excessive politeness. ‘I’ve not had a chance to open the curtains upstairs yet,’ says the young man, ‘but let’s start downstairs.’

The woman shudders dramatically in her coat.

‘The heating’s fully operational,’ the young man says hastily. ‘It just hasn’t been on for a while.’

‘What type of boiler is it?’ asks the man, still wiping his feet.

‘Ah, I might have to get back to you on that,’ the young man replies and I think, It’s a combi boiler, you idiot, it was replaced five years ago, it’s really efficient and cheap to run even though you have to wait a bit for the water to run hot and what the hell are you all doing in my parents’ house?

‘How long has it been empty?’ the man asks then, an edge of aggression in his voice, which to me implies he is already calculating a lower offer if the house has been unsold for a while, just because he can. Something about him: he looks like the kind of man whose main concern with any purchase, large or small, is that he gets himself a bargain.

‘Oh, less than six months,’ the young man says then, as he walks them through to the sitting room.

‘Are the owners still local?’ asks the man.

‘Yes,’ his wife adds, ‘it’s useful, that.’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ says the young man, standing in the sitting room and looking impatient to show it off with a wide-armed gesture rather than answering all these questions. ‘They’ve, um, gone their separate ways I believe. The husband has gone to work in Scotland, I believe the wife is down south, Hertfordshire. I think it’s Hertfordshire.’ My mum grew up in Welwyn Garden City. Her two sisters, my aunts, still live there.

My parents are gone. They have separated. Their grief was too much. What happened to me destroyed them too and even now, as I stand here watching a young estate agent trying to convince a couple to take on the home my mother and father both loved, they are somewhere in their different places, in parts of the country distant from each other, both of them grieving alone. The retirement they had planned – the trips together, their daughter marrying perhaps, even giving them a grandchild, all the things they had hoped for, they are all gone.