Maren spent most of the time doing housework and ironing everything to within an inch of its life. I can still see her now at the ironing board amidst clouds of steam, sawing back and forth across curtains, towels, and table runners until they succumbed and became as flat as she desired. For all her effort, though, I have to say she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Black mould crept along windowpanes, caterpillars of dust slept snug atop picture frames, and the girls’ washing was regularly stuffed into their drawers instead of being folded and laid neatly flat – rendering the over-zealous ironing pointless. I figured Maren’s strengths lay in baking bread, which she did every morning, filling the house with mouth-watering smells. She also spent an hour a day barking Norwegian nouns at Gaia.

Why bring Gaia and Coco out here at all. I wondered? There was nothing for them to do beyond the dour realms of the creepy red house: no parks or play areas, no trampoline or dodgy wooden swing in the garden. Just past the trees towards the cliff men in work clothes and hard hats shouted and drilled all day long.

Granhus was noisy inside, too, with pipes that groaned any time you turned on a tap or flushed the toilet, and a strange high-pitched wail that drifted from the bowels of the house. ‘Old air vents,’ Maren said dismissively, but it was loud and sounded eerily like the yowl of a cat, or a baby crying. The house was bracketed by thick woods inhabited by wolves, bears, and probably witches, near to the towering cliff that overlooked the fjord. At night, when the girls were finally asleep, I’d tiptoe outside to look at the silhouetted forest, the shimmering fjord, and galaxies that jewelled the sky. The woods became conscious with owls, foxes, bats. Moonlight fell on elaborate spider webs and glinting demon eyes hiding in the shrubs.

It was at once mesmerizing and slasher-movie sinister.

The wildlife seemed determined to get inside. Mice and spiders roamed so freely that Gaia began to name them. Often the mice wouldn’t even budge when I stumbled upon them in the larder – they’d stare me out until I swiped at them with a broom. Day and night, enormous black birds – crows, or maybe ravens, but on steroids – circled the house, predator-like, as though they were just waiting for the moment when they might swoop down and peck us all to death.