The house had been repainted so many times that the door frames had lost their edges, and where a hinge had been moved the old screw holes stood proud under the filler like the knuckles of a hand under a sheet.

She had come for a fortnight and had stayed for the winter. This was not a decision anyone had made. The lease on the flat had run out in October and nobody had raised the question again, and by the time the frost came the question had become the sort that is rude to ask.

What she remembered afterwards was the light. Not the quality of it — that was ordinary, a grey coastal light that did nothing for anybody — but its schedule. At four it left the long room entirely, and the lamp went on, and the room became a different and much smaller place with a hard edge somewhere near the second window.

In February the wall behind the eleventh layer turned out to be brick, and behind the brick was a doorway, and behind the doorway was the top of a stair going down into what the deeds insisted was solid ground.