The sea had been hard on him that day, the swell rising grey and indifferent under a sky that gave nothing away. But as the boat turned for home now the choppy water settled by degrees into something calmer as a low sun broke through, glowing gold along the waterline to welcome him back. He'd been lucky, he knew that. Fortune had walked beside him more often than not.

He saw the washing before he saw the cottage itself — sheets and shirts caught on the line, snapping and billowing in the wind like some small private flag, a flag that marked nothing more than a life lived quietly, and for him it meant everything. The wind carried it to him even now, that particular brine-washed smell of linen dried by sea air, salt worked deep into the fibres, indistinguishable from the smell of the water itself. Below the line, in the last low light, he could make out the flowers his wife tended along the sill, roses and lobelia in full riotous bloom, dressed and ready as brides on the morning of their wedding. His nostrils knew by heart the roses' scent, delicate under the salt, easy to miss and impossible to forget once found.

The collie would be there, he knew, stretched along the step, ears already lifting at the sound of the boat's engine long before he could see it himself. And inside, his wife would have the kettle singing, the tea leaves warming in the pot, that dark tannic breath of it mingling with the low cosy smell of turf smoke, filling the small kitchen the way it had every evening of their life together, her smile a warm feeling of love that had always been there for him, even in the most difficult times.

He was a young man once when he'd left, chasing horizons that promised more than the small stone house could ever hold. He had seen cathedrals and coral seas. He had stood in market squares that hummed in languages he never learned, harbours with strange tongues, cities that glittered, coastlines that took his breath in ways he hadn't expected. It occurred to him now, as it always did on the turn home, that a man perhaps needed to go that far, to stand in all those foreign squares and foreign light, before he could see clearly what he'd left behind. The precious things had been close all along. It was the distance that had taught him how to look at them properly.

The golden sun broke fully now across the water, laying its light along the thatch, and he thought, as he always thought on his way back: there is no place like this.