He won’t sell the house, sees its four storeys as success symbols. The thirty acres out back are a kingdom of his own making. And anyway, he says, the market’s saturated. She just notices the dent in the bedroom wall, the cardboard stuck clumsily over that door he kicked in.

Maeve is a twenty-year-old student living in Bristol. She writes rarely in her free time, and often when she is supposed to be studying.