‘Catharina was taller,’ he said finally, with the ‘th’ again pronounced with the hard Dutch ‘t’, and it took a moment for me to realise he was talking about Mum. ‘Yes, Catharina was taller, but apart from that, you are very like. Okay. You are a van Leeuwen. You are one of us. And I am very happy to meet you.’ He put both hands formally at the sides of my head and kissed me on top of my hair. And then he walked out into the yard.

Bette waited until Hessel had gone and then she sat down with her hand over her mouth and giggled like a girl.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What?’

But Bette was almost beyond speaking, she was laughing so hard, tears in her already watery eyes. She reached out and grabbed my hand. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said between wheezes. ‘I’m just so glad.’

I spent the morning with Bette, cleaning. I couldn’t think. I felt like my original plan was in tatters, torn to shreds by the chaos inside the house. But every time I tried to get a new plan of action happening in my head, my mind skittered off. So I cleaned – it was straightforward. Cleaning was something that so obviously desperately needed doing. So I did that. I even managed to get some satisfaction from it. I found a brush and tray in the laundry and discreetly disposed of the dead mouse. I swept up all the mouse poo I could see in the kitchen and did the same with that, hiding it all under the breakfast scrapings.

Again I wondered how they could live like this. Perhaps they couldn’t see it? Perhaps their eyesight was poor? I had read about that. About some elderly people living in squalor simply because they couldn’t see it. It was an interesting question as to whether it was physical or psychological.

And why wasn’t Mum here, helping them?

That was an interesting question, too. It sat uncomfortably, inside, at the back of me somewhere, somewhere I couldn’t look at it directly. Because she’s Mum, I thought to myself. And fucking hopeless. And that almost answered it.

I filled a bucket with hot soapy water and located a decrepit old mop in the laundry-bathroom, which, yes, was the only bathroom in the house. Bette just seemed to accept my industrious cleaning without question. It was as if her granddaughter turning up in the middle of the night and setting her house right was exactly what she had been expecting. She stood mildly washing the dishes at the kitchen sink, looking out of the open window, absent-mindedly picking up again on my idle question about the cairns, taking her time to explain them to me properly.

I was on my hands and knees under the table, using my fingers to rake up stray papers, readying the floor for the mop while Bette detailed the way the boulders had been pulled from the earth when the settlers – ‘Our ancestors, Anna, the great pioneers’ – first cleared the area, removing all the scrub and grassland to make way for cropping and pasture. I was only half-listening, but Bette was quite invested. ‘The hard work of our forefathers that was,’ she said with pride, describing how, with only rudimentary equipment, they had managed to rip the hulking stones out of their prehistoric resting places so that the ploughs wouldn’t snag on them, and then pile them into the mounds. She talked about them as though they were the pyramids of Egypt, a wonder of the world. ‘Our forefathers,’ she said again. ‘Your forefathers, Anna.’ And she scrubbed Hessel’s coffee cup with zealous vigour.