Feeling disgruntled and annoyed with Will, Marnie walked all the way down to the old caretaker’s cottage. Tape had been strung around the perimeter with signs saying: ‘Warning Danger Keep Out’ – but Marnie didn’t care about the tape. She ducked beneath it and walked the overgrown track that led to the gateway to the garden, almost invisible amongst the old, wind-worn bushes. Behind the gate was the short path that led to the squat, pebble-dashed house, the caretaker’s cottage where Marnie and her mother and father had lived together.

The cottage, like the park, was condemned. It would soon disappear beneath the bulldozer’s tracks, to be replaced by a quartet of executive homes, these ones designated ‘luxury residences’ because of the sea views. An artist’s impression was shown on the board at the side of the road, all black slate tiles and floor-to-ceiling windows, blonde women with long-stemmed glasses of Sauvignon Blanc in their hands standing on balconies overlooking the estuary. Whoever would have thought this would become a desirable place to live? When Marnie was a child, the Severn Sands townspeople had regarded the caretaker’s cottage as a slum. Denise used to do her best to make it nice but it was a cold, damp little house, set so close to the water that it was the first building in the town to be engulfed when fog settled on the estuary. The damp was always coming in and leaving behind evidence of itself: dark stains between the covings and the ceilings, a fungal smell emanating from deep inside the walls. Marnie remembered her mother standing on a chair holding a brush and a bottle of bleach, trying to scrub away the stains, wiping her hair from her face with her wrist, muttering, ‘It’s hopeless.’

One awful day, Denise discovered the damp had got into her books, her beloved collection carefully arranged on the shelves John had built into the alcove at the side of the chimney breast. She had taken the books outside and put them on a tarpaulin spread in the sunshine in the back garden, trying to dry out the pages, and she’d tended to those novels as tenderly as if they were sentient beings. Watching her, kneeling amongst them, pushing back the long hair that kept falling over her face, the child Marnie had felt such love for her mother, and for the care she took of her books.

Marnie used to play out here for hours on her own, riding the bike Mrs deVillars had given her up and down the path, or balancing on the roller skates, also a present from Mrs deVillars, her arms held out wide; Trip barking at the clattering of the wheels as she rolled down the slope and her mother, invisible but inside the cottage, reading; always reading or standing on the landing, looking out of the little window that looked over the road, across to Channel View holiday park.