The old house nurses its own secrets: traumatic deaths in its grounds, from the Second World War onwards, are only gradually unveiled. It also comes complete with a misfit caretaker who spends his life struggling to regulate the pool’s alkaline content by means of powerful chemicals. If the character of a spooky handyman is something of a stock one, then the author nonetheless demonstrates that it has plenty of worrisome pizzazz in it yet. All of this is saved from any overtones of Hammer House of Horror and indeed made all the more convincing by Thorpe’s beautifully precise style and sharp eye for social comedy and domestic detail.

Each of the characters is a recognisable type, yet sufficiently well drawn to be spared caricature. Take Lucy, Alan’s gallery-owner wife, “whose beauty was taking affectionate leave of her features from behind a screen of cosmetics”. Or Jamie, Nick Mallinson’s resentful adult son from his first marriage, with whom his infuriated stepmother resists confrontations “since any victory on her part would lead to something worse than Jamie the Annoyance: Jamie the Avenger”.

Thorpe has subtly thickened the atmo­sphere in this novel with historical resentments, whether personal or territorial. Only the immediate Mallinson family — who for all the parents’ intellectual prowess are essentially a bunch of English innocents abroad — is relatively free from bitterness, but unwittingly draws the anger and lust of others like water to a sponge. The reader, alert on their behalf, spends most of the novel anticipating some looming disaster to which the Mallinsons will almost certainly be blind.

The earlier part of the book is more successful in tweaking that anticipation. Later come some rather crudely cinematic plot twists, and a confusing play of endings: it is as though the author, having spent almost all the novel painting in delicately shaded hues, suddenly hurled a bucket of red paint at the canvas and then was at civilised pains to erase it again. Still, the pleasure of travelling to the end was so great that I find myself willing to overlook the dismaying moment of ­ arrival.