It was Ellen, my mother’s closest friend, who told me this charming vignette. She told me one afternoon when we were walking the beach in Thurlestone as my mother slept. I’d been complaining that my mother hadn’t spent any time with us, that she’d just locked herself away in her room. Ellen stopped, caught my arm and pulled me round to face her.

‘John,’ Ellen said, ‘let your mother alone. Give her some peace. She needs some time on her own.’

I was cold, I was fourteen, I was scared that my mother didn’t love me any more. I lashed out. ‘Why didn’t she make my father stay?’ I shouted, as sand whipped by January winds flew around us.

So Ellen told me how my mother had tried to do just that.

I’m forty years old now and I still haven’t fathomed it. My father left my mother because he was worried that I’d be imperfect, that I might be deaf or blind or perhaps contorted, crab-like, with webbed feet. Is that sufficient reason? This is the question I ask myself all the time - is it sufficient reason? The answer, just as his was, is ‘No’. Because he left before I was even born. He left while I was being born, when my mother was in hospital giving birth. I arrived on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, with Scorpio rising to boot, yet even these auspicious signs couldn’t persuade him to stay. As I was tussling my way into the world my father was packing his belongings and leaving and when my mother finally made it back to the flat, it was to find him gone. He did, however, have the good manners to return some materials he had taken that didn’t belong to him. My mother, balancing me awkwardly on one hip, opened the package he had sent her and the first thing she found was a leaflet on family planning.

It was Ellen who told me this too and I know now she was trying to save me from wasting my life imagining I loved my father, imagining that he deserved to be loved. She failed but at least she tried.

I have many scars — from the Corona bottle, from the various router bits, chisels and drills with which I have wrestled. I look at my body and map out my life by scars. But there are many scars I can’t see.

It was months ago that Sonja asked me to tell her the lemonade story; since then she’s been distracted, inattentive. Sometimes I see her, as I sit in my truck and she moves around her world; a world of Patum Peperium, Amaretto, Belgian truffles and Parma ham, bread still steaming from Herbert’s in Montpelier. The deli does very well, despite my misgivings. Sonja has a handy knack - she buys only cheese that makes her think of silver and burgundy, wine of silk, bread of mares’ tail clouds, cold cuts of navy and cotton twills. I hadn’t thought of that - that the admixture of senses might be advantageous. But often now when I pass the shop she’s not there. Where is she? She has always been the model manager, the first to arrive, the last to leave. She used to snatch her lunch in ten minutes in the stock room, maybe wolfing down a samosa or felafel followed by a slab of chocolate brownie. But now I can’t see her when I look for her.