'Time, Tide and Talland' by Nigel Jarrett

It was my wife Rachel's idea to stay at Talland House, once the holiday home in St. Ives of the Stephen family but now converted into holiday flats.

We'd been to the town before, my parents having taken me and Rachel as teenagers (our first sunburned fumblings) and we having stayed there with our kids. They in turn take theirs - our grandchildren - and sometimes invite us too, just for a few dutiful days.

Now we go ourselves mostly out of season, when the place reverts in the imagination to Victorian times. Fish oil flowed in the streets then, and it was a long haul by road to St Erth. It doesn't matter if it rains: in fact, the more weather-beaten the better.

We'd never searched hard for it, but all that time Talland, which looks out on Godrevy Lighthouse, retained the facade in photographs taken when Virginia and Vanessa  Stephen played cricket in the garden, Vanessa holding the bat with awkward correctness and her sister (later Woolf, of that ilk) somewhere else at silly mid-off.

We had one of the back studio flats. Little bits of old Talland peeked through like pentimenti, but scarcely enough to be redolent of times past. Unlike Rachel, I believe literary landscape is geography of the mind.

However, on the third night, Rachel woke with a start. At the bottom of the bed she saw something, someone. Not a dream, not a trick of the light. There was a movement, a motion  focused for a mini-second. We had a laugh about it at breakfast. But the spectre failed to re-appear.

Later that day, we found the exact spot on Porthmeor Beach where my father, one morning in 1957, had sculpted a sand mermaid. By late afternoon, the sea had claimed her.