The farmhouse stood on a headland, or what passed for one here. It was on slightly raised land, above the farmland below. She could see it now, dark even in the sunshine, through the poplar trees that lined the field from the eastern approach. It was a lonely house, stuck out here on its own, away from the town, separated by fields and marsh. The days of nannies and parties and visitors arriving in motor cars along Leafy Lane were all gone. She couldn’t identify the exact moment it had ended but it had not been with her mother’s death. The rot had set in before that.

The farm had been her mother’s dowry on her marriage. Her mother had been used to life on a much larger scale of course. The Felford estate had once owned great tracts of land in Norfolk, though it had all been sold off now. Although Verity had barely been aware of it, there had long been the murmurs of money worries, as far back as she could remember: her father absent for long periods and the farm run mostly by land girls long after the war. When the parties stopped, the house echoed with emptiness. The only visitor was the man from the dairy coming to collect the milk churns. Her mother had stayed more and more in her room. An awkward adolescent, Verity used to creep sometimes into the darkened room to lie next to her mother’s tiny, sleeping form. More than anything, she’d yearned for her to wake up and put her arms around her, to tell her it would all be all right. But her mother never woke, and Verity had tiptoed back out again.

Verity stood now trying to remember when the end had begun as if, in pinpointing the moment of decline, she could understand why it had happened. But however hard she tried, she could not, in the end, remember.

She reached the kitchen door and her fingers automatically felt along the groove etched into the brick at the top of her hip. It marked the high tide from the 1930 flood.