‘Yes please,’ I said, even though I didn’t, but ‘yes’ seemed the right answer. I sat down at the table opposite Gaia, who was introducing Louis to his trousers and chiding him for not wearing any beforehand. It’s naughty, Louis. And you could get a chill. I could hear Tom outside, pacing up and down and chatting to someone on his mobile phone. The kitchen had old Shaker-style turquoise cabinets, red bunting, and the most incredible views framed by each of the three windows. Maren poured me a cup of tea and explained the moose intrusion, though I’d seen it all first hand.

‘They keep coming because they think the river is here,’ she says. ‘This is the problem when you mess with nature. The animals of this place have been drinking from that river for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. And now it’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ I said.

She grimaced. ‘Tom built a dam. He was meant to divert the river, but then it bled into the ground. Turned the whole site into a marsh. And now the elk are going crazy. I won’t be surprised if I come down one morning and find one drinking from the tap.’

She gave a rueful laugh.

I tried to laugh along. Great. She rinsed some mugs, turned back to Gaia. ‘Shall we show Sophie the rest of the house?’

‘We’ll start at the top and work our way down, shall we?’ Maren said, leading me up an incredibly narrow set of stairs. Maren’s ample hips blocked out the light ahead of me, rubbing either side of the wood panelling. She led me to the attic, a long room with six feet or so of head room and bookended by two porthole windows.

‘Mostly storage up here,’ she explained, batting away a moth. ‘But we keep a bed here in case we have guests.’

The next level down had a bathroom and three bedrooms, all with whitewashed floorboards that creaked whichever way I stepped. I noticed framed black and white photographs on the walls of the hallway, ghostly, moody images of the tall, narrow trees I’d seen on the way to the house. Maren saw me admiring them, but kept us moving.

‘These bedrooms belong to me and Tom, and Clive and Derry have what used to be the children’s.’ She turned and smiled politely. ‘Yours is downstairs, and we’ve moved Gaia and Coco’s bedrooms there, too.’

She took us back downstairs and along a narrow hallway behind the kitchen, where a recent extension created a modern living room with a bookcase, sofa and armchairs, then a small office, and a long playroom kitted out with tables, whiteboards, play mats, sand tubs and endless cabinets and cupboards filled with every toy under the sun.