I woke early in the morning of the first full day I would spend on the island. The bedroom I had chosen for myself faced east and the sun had made mincemeat of the inadequate curtains. I would either have to replace them or change rooms.

The cottage was desolate: I understood that it hadn’t been occupied for some years. The landlord of the Shipbuilders Arms had organised to have it cleaned and aired before I moved in, but no more than that. Anyhow, it would have been impossible to disguise emptiness on such a scale.

My home. My cottage. I sat up slightly in bed and looked around. A threadbare rug covered a small area between the bed and the windows; the rest was floorboards. They looked sound enough, but I could feel the chill coming off them. The windows, though, were a revelation. Two on the wall directly in front of me, facing south-east, a large window-seat spanning the pair, and two on the adjacent wall, facing north-east. The morning light flooded in, and I began to see how that must have been healthy for a bedroom in a place like this.

The only furniture in the room appeared to be a dressing table of light-coloured wood with chunky legs. There was a feeling of artisan rather than craftsman about it, and it squatted between the two north-easterly windows. In its mirror I could make out the sliding door to my afterthought of a shower room.

That was my bedroom, then. It hadn’t taken long. Although it wasn’t quite everything: the most significant part of the whole tableau was right under my nose. Under my whole body, in fact. A huge sleigh bed that was surely assembled or even carved in the room where it now stood. There was no hope of ever moving it out without taking off one of the walls. It must have been seven feet wide and the same in length, ornate waterfalls of scrolls rising and breaking organically at each end. I imagined touching the turned wood with my own bare hands, and shivered. So smooth and so deep. No wonder I had slept so well.

I looked at myself, stretched across the northern side of the bed. Covered carelessly with what blankets I could find last night, mostly clothed. A shambles. Was this the new start for which I had been looking? In my defence, it had been dark when I returned from the sunset. I had found some candles and matches in the kitchen, along with a glass for my Barolo, then I stopped looking. My evening had mostly consisted of staring into the hearth by weak candlelight, counting the bricks and imagining the heat coming off a good roaring fire, while sitting on alternate hands to warm them.

I made a mental list: firewood, electricity, provisions, bedclothes, unpack. I knew it wouldn’t take me ten minutes to empty my baggage. I only had the holdalls that I’d brought over on the crossing, and I’d started on them already. I would have a few days to ponder how to furnish the place before the rest of my gear arrived in the container.

A list was my usual fallback plan, and so it proved. It gave me the impetus to drag myself out of that enormous bed. I pulled back the south-east curtains and took the full force of the morning.

If I had thought the sunset spectacular the previous night, this beat it all the way to hell. My view was directly down the jagged coastline which led, in its own time, to the mighty lighthouse. Above it, the sun hovered like a halo, its rays streaming through the lantern room, emerging in every direction, illuminating the entire corner of the island and the shimmering harbour behind it. Seeing it for the first time like that, as I was, one might be forgiven for pondering the very purpose of the lighthouse itself. Who was it actually protecting, and from what?

Under that sun, which grew cleaner and more innocent the further it edged clear of the lighthouse into the empty sky, the world was totally and unfathomably still, the perfect anchor for the invisible thread which swung the mighty star from one horizon to the other each day. Unsure, I raised a foot, held it for a minute, then placed it back on the bedroom floor. Solid as a rock.

I held my hand up as a shade and took in what I could of the view. The air was the sort that nobody who had lived a life like mine would ever have experienced. Through it I could see for miles. The sea was totally flat. Ships plied their business across it. I spotted the ferry by which I had arrived making its return journey. It would make two round trips today, all being well. And I could even make out its destination, the mainland, from my window: I was quite high on my hill. Even though in range of the naked eye, it still felt far, far away. I thought about my container, and immediately told myself not to. I knew it was coming, I knew I couldn’t get a straight answer as to when, and I knew it would drive me mad if I let it.

I left the north-east curtains alone. One view was plenty for now. Instead, I slid the door back and stepped into my shower closet, which was effectively all it was.

There were no controls on the wall. Just a huge showerhead emerging from the ceiling. The walls were uniformly flat. I ran my hand slowly across the whole surface. And back again. I even fiddled about blindly on the obverse side of the enormous head. Absolutely featureless.

Why did I end up in these situations? How could I make such simple things so complicated? Fuming at my own stupidity, I dropped to my haunches. It was a habit I’d picked up through spending most of my life outside, nowhere near a chair. Genius. There it was. A smooth pedal protruding from the wall, around 12 inches above ground level. Of course. I had read about this in my research: there was no mains water on the island. The water would be directly pumped, by my own foot, from the underwater reservoir. It wasn’t even heated by the solar or wind power that supplied the island. This was geothermal all the way.

I remembered now – no property had its own bathtub. The public baths were quite a focal point, I understood.

I straightened up. This was more wonderful than I could have imagined. Natural hot springs, pumped fresh to my salt-streaked skin by my own power. Was this not exactly what I was looking for? I set out into the rest of the cottage with a spring in my step.

The hallway must have been the grandest part of the whole place: wood-panelled and parquet-floored. Light only entered through the stained glass of the imposing front door, and at that moment was weakly throwing a dusting of colour onto the immaculately polished hexagonal wood blocks. A sorry-looking console table stood uneasily against the far wall and constituted the furnishings.

My holdalls lay abandoned on the flawless floor. I picked them up and hoisted them over my left shoulder. They had done no harm.

Four internal doors led off the hallway. I tried the one closest to me.

Behind it I found a beautifully-proportioned room. Carpetless, like the rest of the cottage, it seemed perfectly square, and I probably would have been able to confirm that had I measured it. There was an ordinary sash window to my right as I entered, but the coup de grace was diagonally opposite. The corner of the room, which was the corner of the building – it was a pretty square, hunkering single-storey lump – had been removed and replaced by what I could only describe as a perfect glass bulb. I had never seen anything quite like it.

It was spherical, to all intents and purposes. The glass was clean, flawless. I wondered if anybody had ever walked into it accidentally. I wanted to touch it, to get an idea of its sturdiness, but I didn’t dare sully it with my greasy fingers. At least my marriage had taught me something useful. The bulb faced due south, but its design was such that it offered a 270-degree view; past the town and school to the left, offering a tantalising glimpse of the edge of the demilitarized zone; and, to the right, along the permitted path and the vertiginous descent to The End of the World, not that I knew that at the time: all I could see was the ground falling away and, beyond, the sea like an ice rink all the way to the guillotined horizon. I looked upwards; a telescope would kill to live in this bulb, I told myself.

I turned back to face the empty room. This was my study. No doubt about it. I was sure I could find somebody to fashion me a desk.

An empty room had never before made me so euphoric, and I skipped back into the aristocratic hallway. Crossing it, the next door was on my right. I already knew it led to the kitchen.

The cold stone floor roused me from my dreamlike state, as did the treat for my senses directly in front. The kitchen was directly next to my bedroom, and gave me the very view over the island’s interior that I had denied myself only minutes ago. That view was dominated by the jagged mountain, a kind of curtailed arrowhead, which at that time of year was skirted with a patchwork ocean of flowering gorse. The paths across the island, some cut for one or two concurrent pedestrians, others designed for wheeled forms of transport, formed a pleasing set of Brownian trails. Butterfly motorways.

The mood changed at the outer fence of the demilitarized zone. Bleak, stooping watchtowers still stood at regular intervals around the perimeter, like scars from the island’s past. I was to learn very quickly: nothing is ever torn down; everything on view is a direct result of the island’s natural resources, and it will return to the island when its time has come, and not before.

Even from my lofty position I couldn’t make out anything within the perimeter fence. The magnified sunlight from the lantern room didn’t make it that far, and it seemed a sea fog was blowing in from the eastern coast. Why did I feel guilty? I turned my attention back to the local area with a small quiver.

Directly outside the window was what must once have been a kitchen garden. That perked me up again. I had dabbled with home-grown produce before, but this time I could do it on a proper scale. Potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, leeks. Spinach even. Fruit? I knew the seasons could be harsh here, but I’d do some research. Surely something would survive long enough to get eaten. Beyond the garden was a covered wood store. I could see some large chunks of tree trunk.

An enormous range stove stood cold and lonely on the long wall to my left. Directly opposite, a tall, wide wardrobe looked as if it belonged in the bedroom on the other side of the wall. It had been painted some kind of green once, but retained only distant suggestions of that colour. Between them a chunky dining table that would have seated twelve comfortably. I placed the holdalls on it. Where was I to find eleven dinner companions?

I opened the wardrobe door and looked inside. The door was slightly warped and didn’t fit perfectly. I expected I could get somebody to fix it up. Or maybe I ought to do that sort of thing myself? It was about time I learned some new skills. The wardrobe was empty save for a pile of bed linen.

On the range I found a scribbled note: “Needs charcoal. See Joshua, Griffin.” I picked it up and read it a few times. Five words of genuine human contact. There was nothing else in the room. Not even a refrigerator. Behind the door was a walk-in larder. I walked in. It was empty and dusty, except for a gleaming axe hanging on a fresh-looking nail.

From one of the bags I pulled my oldest shirt, not that any of my possessions were that old. I roughly dusted the shelves. Good enough. Cans on one, jars on another, meat on the left, vegetables on the right, grains at the back. The wine I laid down on the stones, in alphabetical order. One bag was empty.

A brief trip across a corner of the hall brought me to the final door. This was my living room, where I had spent the previous night in the chill semi-darkness. The floor was rough boards, like the bedroom and the study, and the walls were bare even of marks where something might previously have hung. Of the whole cottage, this room was the one with no apparent vestige of love. I resolved straight away to do something about that. I arranged the books according to size, exhilarated in the knowledge that nobody would be along to reclassify or reorder them. They filled the entire unit, and yet the emptiness still echoed as before. What it needed was a roaring fire.

I crossed the room in front of the aged sofa and tried the view from that side. My lawn, for want of a better word. It extended from the front of the cottage all the way to the permitted path, which must have been 60 or 80 feet away. The other side of that were rocks and plenty of sea. Three gravel tracks, surprisingly well tended, wound from the fulcrum of my front door to the path: one went straight, one half-right, one half-left. On either side and between them, the grass had a touch of clifftop heath about it, but was as immaculate as the paths. I stood at the window and stared happily. The image of Betsey Trotwood, shaking a stick and shooing frantically at grazing donkeys, arose in me involuntarily. What I was looking at was exactly the scene I had pictured when I had first encountered her lawn in Kent.

My heart was lighter than I had expected it to be during the previous empty evening. Under the benevolent eye of the morning sun, in one short tour I had become an interior decorator, a writer, an astronomer, a market gardener, a joiner, a lumberjack and finally had descended gently into the pages of David Copperfield. Harmlessly naïve and undiscerning, I came over like a university freshman.

Returning to my bedroom and the capacious window seat, I made a genuine written list:

Chop logs
Electricity
Make proper shopping list
Make bed
Get charcoal – find Joshua
Find out about container arrival
Vegetable garden
Curtains
Carpets
Desk/wardrobe door
Walls – populate

I could have carried on for ever, so I stopped.