And when Bette said, ‘It’ll be so nice for the old house to have someone else to appreciate it,’ I turned and hugged and kissed her too.

And then straight away I started gathering my things.

I found a box and filled it with my laptop and tablet and books and carried it all across the gravel patch.

In the entrance hall of the old house, broken glass crunched under my shoes, but the sunlit room felt like a different place altogether. I dropped the mattress to the floor. Dust whooshed away underneath it, but the mattress itself was relatively clean.

I would need a chair. And a lamp. And a power board. And an extension lead, to reach the power outlet across the room – seemingly the only step Hessel had managed of the grand restoration he had planned. I ran back to fetch the chair from the little bedroom and – again at the last moment – my memento mori. The skulls grinned all the way across the gravel yard, riding on the chair and surveying the grey sky above us as we travelled.

The table needed a bit of repositioning. As I dragged it across the floor it hummed and rattled and shook, gathering vibrations from the wooden boards and turning them into table-shaped sound. And when the sound stopped I became suddenly aware of the expanse of the house, of the unseen upstairs, of the empty rooms up there and the way my table-dragging sound must have been filling them.

On my last trip back to the little house to fetch a jug of water and a glass, Hessel disappeared and after a moment reappeared from the back of the house with an old copper-coloured bankers lamp.

‘You should take this,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Grandpa,’ I said. And when I plugged the lamp in at the back of the room in Bromley Cairn, I flicked the switch and the globe went warmly on and off. It was no chandelier, but it filled me with happiness.

And suddenly, finally, there was the feeling I’d been waiting for.

Here wasn’t what I had expected. It wasn’t. The comfortable rambling farmhouse, the trees and hills and meandering tracks and gentle country walks of my fantasy escape . . . they were somewhere else, somewhere far away, probably in a BBC drama. But that didn’t matter. That was irrelevant. Everything I needed was here. I had time and space and quiet and people who didn’t mind having me around. I’d been accepted, as far as I could tell. In fact, I belonged. That was the feeling I’d been waiting for. Rightness. Acceptance. Belonging.

The old house creaked and shifted and then settled again. I stood in front of the table and looked out through the window. A sparrow pecked at a seed in the grass and then leapt into a shrivelled boxthorn, making it shake. Across the yard the other little house caught the last rays of the sun, and suddenly seemed so far away.