Once the dog and I were safely on separate sides of the door, I would unpack the meat which I had bought to cook for dinner – a pork chop, perhaps, or a piece of calf’s liver – and wave it back and forth while the hungry Rollo watched me through the glass door, yapping with frustration. When I finally cooked and then ate it, sitting behind the glass, the bad-tempered beads of Rollo’s eyes followed each movement of my fork. Then I would dole a tin of Matey dog food into his dish, as I had promised the Whartons. When the door opened he would rush in, wheezing and growling, uncertain whether to bite me or bury his muzzle in the Matey first – but the lure of the Matey always won, and the monotony of chewing gradually sedated him.

The top of the house, where I lodged, was a Rollo-free zone: he was too fat and idle to mount the stairs. Mine was a high-ceilinged room, vacated by the naval officer son and left with few adornments: a model ship, now permanently docked on the surface of the dresser, and a small, framed oil painting of a storm at sea.

I liked this painting: it showed furious waves rearing up towards a swirl of dark grey skies, lit by a single streak of lightning. That was all. The fact that man was entirely absent from this struggle lent the picture a rare modesty. The artist had not felt minded to include any kernel of human interest in the form of some tiny, plucky vessel battling against the high seas. It made me think with relief of how nature ticked on without us in all the places that we can’t see. I asked Mrs Wharton who had painted it, but she just muttered something about a relative of Mr Wharton’s and carried on with her dusting.

On windy nights my windowpane rattled in its frame, and I would lie in the dark listening to the hum of traffic from the street and thinking about home. Rollo lay in the dark too, two storeys down, snorting and dreaming of a falling rain of pork-gristle.

Mr Wharton was a tallish, stout man, with a face the colour of a rare steak and iron-grey hair that ascended from his head in a hopeful Marcel wave towards heaven. Mrs Wharton was a birdy little cockney woman, with a pair of permanently startled eyebrows, a topiary frizz of poodle-cut blonde hair and a furious energy. In life, Mr Wharton liked a steak-and-kidney pie, a couple of pints of Guinness, Mrs Wharton and Rollo. He was well disposed towards me – not so much as an individual, it often seemed, but as a benign ambassador from his own, distant Belfast past.