My reminiscences lasted long enough for the sun to have climbed above the line of my bedroom window, and I didn’t have to squint any more. My solar panels were taking the full force, drinking in what they could while they still could. They had been around long enough to know what was coming.

I lay on my bed, unable or unwilling to move. I looked around the room for something: inspiration, permission? Somewhere outside the bedroom, in the hallway or on the far side, I felt a pulsing. It was slow and regular, healthy, a heartbeat. Silently I asked for help from my room: I needed something to rouse me.

The beat came closer. It was close either side of me now, and I physically felt the rush accompanying each beat. The door in its frame was gently throbbing with every thump. I tuned in to the never-changing rhythm, and I could see more and more clearly the whole room, each wall, the windows, even the ceiling joining in the soft pulsating dance. I raised myself in bed gradually and saw how the feet of each piece of furniture took a tiny leap upon each ba-boom, imperceptible to anybody who hadn’t become part of it, but clear as day to me.

I dressed in jogging bottoms and a rough t-shirt I had found in a tough pile in the cellar. It suited the morning perfectly. It would have suited Penny on a morning like this even better. I could almost picture her emerging from the other side of my sleigh bed, her long arms stretching like creepers towards the ceiling and pulling her perfect spine with them, upwards then around, diving down and along the bed’s end until her smiling face reappears somewhere near my feet; a lizard tongue darts out and lashes my ankles together, I fall and her tendrils of fingers scoop me up onto the bed once more and I’m helpless in her elastic clutches.

My face reddened. I was alone, yet I still felt foolish like a child. My blood sugar must have been low. I walked soundlessly through the hallway to the kitchen. The boards felt sensitive like exposed organs under my feet and I didn’t want to cause them any pain. The kitchen was more solid and I relaxed. I made eggs and an enormous pot of tea. I blushed, once more, at my earlier experience of tea, before I lived on the island. A pale, watery shadow of the reality here. Innocence, ignorance, it mattered not what word you used: the truth was the same.

The breakfast gave me strength. The pulsing of the cottage diminished gently into the background and I gazed through the eyes in the kitchen wall across to the Mountain. They were focussed on the summit, naturally. All eyes on the island were the same. There was no doubt about it: the snowline had descended since the day before. At the same rate, there were a few more days until it reached the overhang, but one big fall could do it. My time was running out, although I was still safe, especially in that kitchen, just inches from the powerplant of the range, blindly burning its fuel and pumping heat around its network. Its ambivalence reassured me.

The windows blinked and the Mountain disappeared for a split second and I got up from the remains of my breakfast. I drifted into the hallway as if gravity were drawing me. I dropped to the floor and caressed it, feeling a nap that could never have been there yet it bristled gently one way and then smoothed the other under my moving hand. Had Penny ever seen, ever lain her cheek against this wondrous finish? I thought no, but I couldn’t have been sure.

I substituted her hands for mine. Mine were so imperfect, fashioned by earthly powers, and their rough palms were probably tearing a layer off the top of the sensitive parquet. She stroked the floor tenderly, one way and then the other with balletic sweeps of both arms. The cottage sighed along with me, and the hairs on its walls stood proud with the electricity. I had to make her stop: this was no way to carry on in broad daylight up on my bluff.

I gathered myself and left the hallway sheepishly. The hearth was unbalanced like a miscarriage of justice. I had used all the logs from one of the baskets. I warned myself to be more careful about stocking and unstocking the baskets: asymmetry could take a hold of a man quite easily, and was the last thing I needed as the Winter approached.

She sat in the corner, lightly rocking on a noiseless chair, sewing a sea scene that I would mount on the wall above her as soon as she said. I smiled. She was using my reading light, but what good was reading when her fingers were firing that needle back and forth through the taut hemp fascia? Even Turgenev’s words would have sounded clumsy and infantile against that backdrop. The windows winked at me and I wandered over to take in their scene.

My lawn had remained immaculate all the time I had been living in the cottage. The previous day or two, I had worried about how I ought to manage it. Sooner or later it would need attention, I was sure. Somebody must have been tending it before I had arrived, but I couldn’t expect that to go on forever. I knew everybody had to take their own share of responsibility. But the scene I witnessed made me think twice.

Each of the four segments of lawn, delineated by my various paths, had been claimed by one of an equal-sized family of donkeys. They were working their ways, without any sense of a hurry, across their own quarter, leaving no blade of grass unshaven. I watched for some minutes as they moved methodically in clockwise spirals around their giant plates. If they sensed my attention, they did well to hide it. Every now and then one would glance over to the permitted path, where their keeper, it seemed, was puffing on an unwieldy pipe. I couldn’t make out who it was.

I tried to put myself into Betsey Trotwood’s shoes and imagine her dismay at the scene, but I felt indulgent and contented. Her antagonism towards these harmless creatures grated on me and I lost some of my respect for her. I had a volume of David Copperfield on my shelf, and I vowed to reread it soon.

Penny would love this scene, I told myself, and I turned to call her to the window, if she could spare the time. The chair sat empty and static, the lightbulb above it dark and cold. I wrenched my gaze back in disgust.

Further afield the harbour floated and glistened. Ant-men moved in unintelligible tracks around the warehouses and the ferry picked up speed on its trudge back to the mainland. I thought of my absent container for the first time in what seemed like days. Behind me, the room showed no signs of needing anything I might have packed in the box. The other rooms were in an identical boat, even the guest room that I mistrusted and for which I had found no purpose. I thought maybe it would be sensible to get a message to the shipping company and cancel the delivery. It would save them the bother of having to fulfil their whole side of the bargain. They were welcome to whatever was in there. But I resisted: my experience suggested to me that I should let things run their natural course. Who knew what severance charges there might be, hidden under the unvoiced agreement I had blithely signed all those aeons ago.

The contents of the box could happily live in the cellar while I decided on their eventual fate. It was mostly empty now. I descended happily to try out some visualisation of the scene that I might create.

The half of the cellar where Santino’s furniture had patiently awaited my arrival and enlightenment was swept almost completely clean. In the far corner sat a bed that had been too large to transport upwards. It seemed a prototype for my own: its conception along the same lines, although the craftsmanship inferior. Beside it stood a wardrobe on squat feet and a circular polished table for which I could find no home, although I had toyed with the idea of removing the top and hanging it as a mirror.

Despite the container’s unnatural size, its contents would take up no more than a small fraction of the acreage I had at my disposal. I tried to picture individual items and how they might fit most unobtrusively into the space, which I was loath to use up completely. But it was impossible. I had seen it coming, and now any memory I had had of those possessions had been well and truly obliterated. Unease jostled with liberation in me, although I could sense the entire cellar stretching into an enormous smirk. It was probably right: it normally was.

Behind me, in the workshop corner, two legs leaned carefully against the wall. I eyed them from a distance for a while, but it was too dark for that, so I approached and squatted before them. I took one in each hand. The left was, for want of a better word, square in cross-section. I had got a nice taper down to the foot and was pleased with it. That represented a large number of hours’ work for me. The right was more complex, turned and shaped in ever-changing interpretations of the classic cylindrical form, once more generally decreasing in girth towards the lower end. I compared the two. Hardly any difference in effort between them, both the gratifying results of amateurish trial and cack-handed error, yet one seemed so simplistic when viewed against its neighbour. To hold them was to dispel that illusion, but who was going to hold them, apart from me?

My agonising was over which would win the battle and gain selection for the final model. Should I go uncomplicated and classic, or show off a bit? I was even toying with the idea of mixing and matching: front legs simply tapered, sitting unobtrusively next to my own; rear legs, on show to the room at large, ostentatious and ballsy. But the jury was still out, and behind them a creative bottleneck was forming. I wanted to know exactly what I was dealing with down below before starting on the body of the desk, and all the other proportions would arise from that.

This was no time, either, to be attempting a resolution. The image of the empty log basket arose once more in my mind, and I replaced the legs carefully in their corner. To be holding them in my hands while thinking of wielding an axe, no matter how unrelated that might have been, seemed unethical. I trotted upstairs, grabbed the empty basket, unhooked my axe and made for the wood store. As soon as I picked up that weapon I felt invincible.

I chopped until the basket was full. My strength had developed well since my first effort, and the logs kept coming. I calculated I would need just one more parent log, as we called the monstrous chunks of tree transported to able-bodied households, to see me right for the Winter. There would be time for organising that. This was time for swinging a blade. I had as long as I liked: there would be no run today.

The afternoon was well into its stride by the time I was setting up the fire. It was too early to light it just yet, and I left it, prepared, to deal with the emerging priority: the other steak in my cold store. It probably would have survived for one more day but the butcher had advised today at the latest and I didn’t want to see it go to waste.

It had been a long time since breakfast, and that will have helped, but the steak was an improvement even on the first one. It needed no more than a slab of fried polenta and some of those courgettes, sautéed, on the side, and a bottle of brewery bitter. I even did the dishes straight away. I lit the fire and settled down with Fathers and Sons and another bottle. This time I hardly got any further than on my previous effort. Everything was so painfully perfect. The fire, the balanced log baskets, the brewery nectar and the unfaded sense of that simplest of meals that had so recently passed via my tastebuds. Even the memory of the softness of the washing up water made my hands tingle. To add Turgenev’s prose to the whole scene drove me over the edge. You can’t supersize perfection. So, once again, I folded the volume respectfully on my chest and lay back to consider.

Ordinarily, even a small dose of Turgenev would make me hungry for my study and my writing desk. The challenge of living up to such a master was the sort of thing that motivated me. To continue to be devoured by hungry yet discerning minds even after 150 years or more of linguistic and social evolution was the sort of legacy I was desperate for. For me, it was the only measure of a man. But it was an impossibility: my study lacked the one thing I needed. Currently, all that existed of my desk was a pair of legs, and there was the distinct possibility that only one of those would make the cut. There were so many more decisions to make: the appropriate joints to use, exact dimensions and proportions, finish, drawer configuration, I could have gone on to myself, but it sent me round in circles. It was something I just had to get right.

There was no way I could write without a desk.