A few days later, we went out to lunch. I can’t remember how old I was when my mother and I started going out to lunch. When I was little, I remember that she and my father used to banter about whether he was taking her to lunch; they had dinner together every night of their married life, but lunch was a meal through which my father ordinarily worked. I can remember how my mother would get dressed up for the occasional lunches he afforded her; I can remember her leaving the house with the stinging smell of fresh perfume. Later, so confident in their love, they let lunch slide: my father worked during the day, and my mother had so many friends to see that it was perhaps easier all around for them to stick to dinner. At some stage, my mother and I took to going out to lunch together, and we would have one lunch out in every school vacation, maybe two or three in the summer. We would go to restaurants slightly less grand than the ones she visited with my father, and she would get slightly less dressed up, but they were still glamorous places and she still had that aura of perfume around her.

It was a beautiful autumn day, with the slightest nip in the air, and I was wearing a blazer and a new tie, and the breeze felt good. My mother was very weak by then, and had to wear a long fur coat, which she kept draped around her shoulders throughout lunch. Her very short hair was slightly less short than it had been during the summer, and it had been arranged into a boyish coif that seemed carefree, carefree as my mother had never been. I told her at lunch that I thought I might move back to New York. “You don’t have to move back here for me,” she said. “You come and visit. That’s enough, really, enough.”

But I told her that now that Bernard and I had broken up there wasn’t any real reason to be in London. I told her that I had finally realized that, in moments of crisis, I myself reverted to American responses, and that it was easier to be in America. I told her about sympathy and empathy, the one so English, the other so American. I told her how alien Britain was, and I told her about the chill I’d had when Bernard had suggested that I go home and try to keep everything as normal as possible. I told her that I didn’t think I’d like to grow old in that slightly-­below-room-temperature society. I told her I was ready for an American career. And then I told her—because at that moment it seemed completely true—that when I was in London I felt so far away from her, and that I wanted to be on hand to help her get through this time of suffering.