I have never been so happy to see a sign for Krimovice in my life, and that includes the first time I spotted it, which was roughly forty minutes earlier when I had already driven past it. The sat nav and I were not on speaking terms by that point. I had followed her instructions with the blind faith of a man who cannot read a map, only to find myself on a dirt track that grew progressively more agricultural until I was essentially sharing the road with a goat. The goat looked at me with what I can only describe as weary recognition, as if this happened every Tuesday.

The turn I had missed, it turned out, was not so much a turn as a suggestion of a gap between two stone walls, marked by a faded sign that had probably been installed during the Yugoslav era. I reversed back along the track, which in a hire car with questionable clutch control was an exercise in humility and mild terror. A man pruning olive trees watched me without expression. I gave him a cheerful wave that I absolutely did not feel.

But then, suddenly, there it was. The villa sat among cypress and olive trees with that particular kind of Montenegrin understated confidence, all stone and terracotta and the promise of doing absolutely nothing for a week. I stumbled out of the car with the slightly manic energy of someone who has been lost in beautiful countryside for the better part of an hour, and promptly tripped over my own suitcase. The garden smelled of thyme and warm earth and something else I could not identify but immediately wanted more of.

The key was where they said it would be, in a little lockbox that required the kind of manual dexterity I do not possess after a flight and a drive. I fumbled. I dropped the code. I fumbled again. A lizard observed this from a sun-warmed wall with the patience of a creature that has nowhere to be and nothing to prove. I envied him deeply.

Inside, the villa had that wonderful quality of being immediately someone else's home that you are temporarily allowed to borrow. Terracotta floors, wooden beams, furniture that looked like it had been chosen by someone with taste and time. I dumped my bags with the theatrical exhaustion of a man who had climbed Everest rather than navigated rural Montenegro with inadequate signage.

But the garden. That was where I was heading, and where I stayed. I found a lounger in a patch of afternoon sun, positioned between two olive trees with a view down towards the water that glittered in the distance like someone had scattered foil across the bay. I had brought three books, which now seems like ambition bordering on arrogance. I opened the first one, read approximately four paragraphs, and fell asleep with it on my chest.

This became the pattern. Mornings I would make coffee in the small kitchen, carrying it outside in a mug that I slowly came to think of as mine, though of course it was not. I would sit with it as the sun climbed over the hills behind the villa and the swallows began their impossible aerial mathematics. Sometimes I would read a chapter. Sometimes I would watch a spider reconstruct its web between two lavender bushes with the methodical patience I was supposedly cultivating. The spider was better at it than me.

The garden had different rooms, I discovered. The sunny terrace where I roasted myself like a sensible Englishman who knows that factor thirty exists and chooses to ignore it. The shaded corner under a pergola where grape vines were working towards some future ambition I would not be present to witness. A stone bench that caught the evening light and became my designated aperitif spot, though my aperitif was usually just more coffee or occasionally a beer from the little shop in Krimovice that I drove to with exaggerated caution, having not forgotten the goat.

I did go to the coast once, briefly. I saw Budva, or at least its outskirts, and felt a strange relief to be heading back inland to my stone walls and my lizard and my book that I was still only four paragraphs into. The Kotor Riviera is spectacular, everyone says so, and they are right. But there is something about having it there, glimmering in the distance, visible but not demanding, that suited me better than being in it. I could see the bay from my terrace. That was enough. That was perfect, actually.

On my last evening I sat with my undrunk coffee as the light went golden and then rose and then faded into that particular blue that makes you understand why people paint. The lizard was there, or a lizard, or perhaps several generations of lizards who had passed down the wisdom of this wall through the centuries. I had finished one book, finally, and started another that I would not finish, and this seemed exactly right. The olive trees rustled in a breeze I could not feel. Somewhere, presumably, the goat was still about his business.

I had arrived in a state of mild panic and navigational shame, and I was leaving with something I can only describe as a stubborn contentment, the kind that does not want to be photographed or explained. Just a garden, and a lounger, and the radical act of deciding that this was enough.