Weeds have grown through the gravel path and the gardens have gone back. Bindweed has choked the rosebeds, and the clipped lawn is now a yellow meadow picked out with bright poppies.

“It was all so tidily mowed and maintained.”

“It hasn’t been for a long time.”

The rhododendrons have grown taller, the elm and ash crowd in more, but beyond them the house is still there, mirrored in the lake. The upper windows have been boarded over and the blinds are drawn on the lower floors, so that it is like a blinkered version of its former self. There are no men singing on the steps. No gramophone music distorts across the garden. It is as still as an Impressionist painting. It is only the light that vibrates.

“The winds last winter weren’t kind,” says the agent.

A tree has fallen, bringing the far end of the conservatory down into so much buckled metal and fallen glass. Edie remembers the men in wicker chairs looking out in their convalescent blues, all their faces in the glass, looking like they were waiting. Where are all those men now?

“How quickly nature takes it back.”

The climbing roses haven’t been pruned and they sway away from the walls in the wind. Ivy has crept over the balustrade and is claiming stonework and windowpanes.

“I’ve already cleared it back from around the door twice,” says Bowen. “It blunted my pruning shears. It’s like it wants to seal it in, to close the lid on the mausoleum.”

Edie watches as he turns the key and pushes the door. Blown leaves shift and skitter across the tiles.

“Don’t spook easily, do you?” he says.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Good. The last patients left two years ago and the family never really made it a home again. There’s nothing here but echoes and mice now. I shan’t admit to the number of times that a creaking shutter or a rustling in the walls has made me jump.”

Edie steps through the leaves and recalls crossing the same floor tiles four years earlier, struck then by the grandeur of this place. The skylight still casts its yellows and blues down around her feet, but when she looks up she sees how the glass is grimed and the silhouettes of fallen branches break the symmetry of the leading.

Bowen nods at a line of packing cases. “Just waiting to make their exit. A few last personal things. I’ve got to go up to the library. Do you want to come up with me?”

Edie remembers the sweep of the staircase. She remembers holding on to the stair rail and a flutter in her stomach as she had followed the nurse up. Her knees hadn’t felt quite steady. She had felt fear at that moment.