I have never been so grateful for a cup of instant coffee in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once paid six quid for a flat white in Shoreditch that tasted of disappointment and pretension. But I am getting ahead of myself. The journey to Finnas Lykling began, as so many of my holidays do, with me being utterly convinced I knew better than the satnav.

The drive from Bergen was spectacular in that understated Norwegian way, all granite and fjord and low clouds doing their best impression of a watercolour. I had hired a Volvo that smelled faintly of fish and optimism, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself until I missed the turning for Lykling not once but twice. The third time I simply parked in what I believed to be the property's gravelled area, stepped out with the confidence of a man who had definitely read the directions, and promptly sank ankle-deep into what I can only describe as aggressively wet moss. My left welly remained behind. I hopped about like a middle-aged flamingo until a voice called out from behind a woodshed.

"You are not from here," it said, which felt less like observation and more like gentle accusation.

The speaker was a woman in her sixties wearing a knitted jumper that appeared to have been constructed from several sheep's worth of ambition. She introduced herself as Ingrid, though she said this as if I should already know, and informed me I was currently trespassing on her brother's potato patch. I apologised with what I hoped was charming British ineptitude. She regarded me with the expression of someone who had seen many such apologies and found them uniformly insufficient.

"The actual house," she said, pointing with a garden fork, "is down there. Where the big tree is. The one that looks like a tree."

I retrieved my welly with a sound like a walrus escaping quicksand and squelched in the direction indicated. Ingrid watched the entire performance without offering assistance, which I rather respected her for.

Finnas Lykling itself, when I finally arrived at the correct location, was one of those traditional wooden houses that Norwegians seem to produce effortlessly, all red paint and white trim and the particular stillness of a place that has witnessed several centuries of sensible decisions. I was still admiring the porch when the door opened to reveal a man who could only be described as Ingrid's opposite: short, round, bearded, and radiating the sort of immediate warmth that makes strangers tell him their problems on buses.

"English?" he said, before I could speak. "I can tell. The welly. Only English people wear wellies to Norway in August."

This was Torvald, who owned the property with his wife, though he quickly clarified that she was currently in Stavanger visiting their daughter and he was "managing alone, which means badly." He showed me round with the enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting for an audience, pointing out the wood-burning stove he had installed himself ("two fingers, but they grew back"), the view of the Bomlafjord that he insisted was "adequate today, but wait until Tuesday," and a small boat he referred to as his "divorce prevention vessel" because "we go out, we argue, we come back, we are still married."

I had not been inside twenty minutes when Ingrid appeared at the door with a thermos and three mugs. She did not ask if she was invited; she simply entered and poured, and the three of us sat at the kitchen table while Torvald produced biscuits from a tin decorated with what appeared to be an angry moose.

"You will fish," Ingrid said. It was not a question.

"I hadn't really planned to," I admitted.

"Torvald will take you. He needs supervision."

"I do not need supervision," Torvald protested, with the weariness of a man who had had this argument many times.

"You caught yourself last summer."

"That was one time. And I was proving a point about the hook."

They bickered like siblings, though they were not related, a fact I established only when Ingrid mentioned her actual brother, the potato patch owner, with whom she was currently not speaking because of an incident involving a fence and some disputed rhubarb. The details remained unclear, but Torvald filled in gaps with commentary that Ingrid mostly ignored.

By the time I finished my coffee, which Torvald had made with what tasted like six tablespoons of grounds and a general disregard for cardiovascular health, I had learned that Ingrid had lived in Lykling her entire life except for one year in Oslo that she referred to only as "the mistake," that Torvald had been a ferry captain until he "retired to become more annoying to my neighbours," and that both of them were genuinely curious about why I had chosen to holiday somewhere with, in Ingrid's words, "no proper shop and nothing to do."

"I wanted peace," I said, which sounded pretentious even to me.

"Peace," Torvald repeated, as if trying the word for size. "We have that. Also rain. And Ingrid."

"You are lucky to have me," she said, standing to leave. "Tomorrow, eight in the morning. He will pick you up for fishing. Wear proper boots, not your English wellies. The fish can smell inadequacy."

She left without further ceremony. Torvald stayed another hour, telling me about the local area with the particular pride of someone who had never considered leaving it, pointing out landmarks I could not yet see through the gathering dusk, promising that the weather would "do something interesting" by the weekend. When he finally departed, he shook my hand with both of his and said, "You will do," which I chose to take as warm endorsement.

I sat alone in that wooden house, listening to the particular silence of a place without traffic or streetlights, and I thought about how I had arrived convinced I was seeking solitude, how I had instead found myself collected by strangers like a stray cat. It was not what I had planned. It was, I suspected, exactly what I needed. The fish, I decided, could definitely smell inadequacy, but perhaps they would not mind it as much as I feared.