It always felt nice opening the door to the sitting room. We kept it warm. There was always a fire going in the big, old, wrought-iron cooker that had been there since they built the house a hundred years before. The heat would hit you like a wall. And I’d usually have baked. It would smell of pastry, or apple cake, or warm scones, mixed with whatever I was stewing for John’s tea. It was all meat and pastry and crumbs and warm air; all laundry powder and starch.

‘Look at it,’ I said, mouth open, staring at the window. The rain was coming down so hard it could have been a mirror. I knew the view from that window so well I could have drawn it from memory but I could barely see it for the waterfall that was cascading down the window. My garden seemed to have been turned into a swirl of wet paint and the fields beyond were just a great soggy wedge the colour of new moss. ‘We’re going to be swept away.’

I handed her a warm towel from in front of the range, opening the oven door so the heat from the coals would pump another little cloud of heat into the room. Our clothes started to steam. I wanted to strip off, down to my vest and tights, but I couldn’t do such a thing in the sitting room and it would have been rude to go upstairs and leave her by herself. So I stayed soggy. Towelled my hair and filled the kettle and rummaged in the good tin for the posh biscuits. Laid out the cups and saucers we’d only used a dozen times since we wed. Listened to the kettle rattling on the cooker top and the rain against the window. Those five minutes stretched like dough.

‘You know what we saw,’ she said. She had put copies of the Hexham Courant on the sofa and was sitting on them primly.

‘Let’s not think about it right now,’ I said, and it sounded rather a hopeless thing to say. ‘Do you want a change of clothes? I don’t know what will fit but you’ll catch your death—’

‘I don’t care,’ she snapped. ‘It doesn’t matter. We need to—’

‘Warm socks,’ I said, too loud. ‘I’ll get you some of John’s. I knit, he darns. They’ll warm you through. Do you not wear socks in Oxford? Is that not the done thing?’

She looked at me like I was a mad person. Looked down at her feet, as if answers might be written on her mottled skin.