This is too terrible for words: the wrongness of my dying before my parents overwhelmed them and now it overwhelms me.

The couple exchange a look and I wonder if they are the sort of people who believe that when you move into a house, something of the spirit of the previous owners remains, that you can inherit the bad luck of a place in the same way as a missing roof tile or a door that creaks.

The young man sees the look and adds hastily, ‘But there’s no problem with conveyancing, that’s all been sorted, that’s the benefit of it having been empty for a while. And of course it’s a very good price, very good indeed in fact.’

The couple are standing in the middle of the sitting room and turning slowly. I can see on their faces that they are trying to imagine themselves there – where their own furniture, their own pictures might go. They are both looking as if creating that image in their heads is proving a bit of a stretch. In the television alcove, there are two laminate shelves where my parents used to keep photographs in silver frames – a slightly odd place to leave them as the light in that corner was poor and you had to reach up and over the television to pick them up, but I knew that my mother would have thought to herself, out of harm’s way. There had been their wedding photo and a rather awful one of me looking bleached in my graduation gown. In between them, in pride of place, had been the holiday snap of all three of us, timeless, caught in that particular moment that just so happened to summarise our lives, the happiness of our trio. The photos are all gone now, of course.

The man and woman are standing next to each other and still turning slowly, the man clockwise, the woman anticlockwise, surveying the room with twin expressions of scepticism. How dare you? I think it clearly. How dare you stand there, in my parents’ sitting room, and look down on it. They were good people. Whatever the estate agent has told you just now, you aren’t looking at an unhappy home. You should feel privileged, to have the chance of occupying the space they occupied. We were happy here. Don’t you dare sneer at them.