The divine comedy of Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve come back to the empty house for the second time in the six weeks since my mother died. The last time I came back, I felt her lingering presence: benign, modest, humorous. But this time she’s absent. Alison, who came once a week to clean, told me that my mother’s last words to her were: ‘Don’t forget to clean the skirting boards behind the beds.’ My mother liked her house to be clean. She kept on top of it, wielding the vacuum cleaner when she’d reached the stage where she couldn’t stand unaided.

It’s a lovely old house on a rainswept promontory overlooking the bay. It badly needs money spent on it — the roof, the tarmac drive, a new heating system to banish the damp from an increasing number of interior walls — but she did what she could within her meagre and diminishing means to keep it up.