‘That’s right,’ I say, watching as the man reaches the other side of the road and gently puts the dog on to the grass. ‘London is just too much for us right now. There are too many painful memories.’

‘I completely understand,’ says Jane, nodding her head. ‘I lost my husband five years ago. It was cancer, in his case, so we had time to prepare for it, unlike you, poor thing, but when he passed I knew I would have to sell up and find somewhere else. He loved to garden and seeing the empty greenhouses each morning was just too much to bear.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I say, relaxing a little in the wake of Jane’s honesty. ‘They say it’s just bricks and mortar but houses are so much more than that, aren’t they? They contain a whole lifetime of memories and stories. Oliver, my late husband, was so much a part of the Chelsea house. I can still see him sitting at the kitchen table when I come downstairs. It’s like he never left.’

Beside me, Jane Treadwell nods her head.

‘But after he died I remembered a conversation we had when we’d just got married,’ I say, my chest tightening as the sign for Rosedale Manor comes into view. ‘He knew how much I loved the countryside and that I’d compromised a bit by deciding to live in London with him. So he made me promise that if he died before me I would go and find my rural idyll.’

I feel terrible for lying to her but part of it is true. I think of my mother. She would want me to work hard and, one day, to have the chance to own a house like Rosedale Manor. My dream house.

‘Oh, that is lovely,’ says Jane as we sweep into the grandest driveway I have ever seen. ‘Now let’s hope Rosedale Manor is the one.’

She stops the car in front of the house and I have to restrain myself from gasping. The photographs had been impressive enough but in real life the house is magnificent.

‘It’s Grade II listed,’ says Jane, taking a set of keys from her bag to open the door. ‘So there’d be limits to what you could do to it.’

I wouldn’t want to change a thing, I think to myself as we step into a circular entrance hall. The walls are painted sage green, in keeping with the Regency style, and there is a highly polished table in the centre with a tall glass vase of lilies on top.

‘Rosedale Manor was built in 1820 and was home to four generations of the Hipsley family until 1910 when it was sold to Anglo-Irish politician J. P. Mulvey.’