Then one day at university I bumped into someone who knew your father. Turned out he hadn’t been working for months and that was why we had money problems. He’d been doing a bit of decorating at other people’s houses and occasionally selling a design to companies that printed advertisements. But the point is that he didn’t tell me. He just said we didn’t have enough money and the reason we didn’t was because he went out to pubs and coffee houses all the time when I was at work, spending what little money we did have. I wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d told me. Maybe we could have talked about it and sorted something out. But instead he lied to me. When I told him I knew what was going on he was furious and told me that I shouldn’t interfere.

You have to understand, John, what kind of a man your father was. I’ve said he was handsome and he was. He was tall, with black hair and blue eyes — and obviously that’s who you take after, although I think you’ll be taller than he was. He was funny and charming he was Bohemian, in that he didn’t live like other people, he didn’t follow the same rules as other people. It was 1957 and people were very conventional. But your father wasn’t. He smoked, he drank a lot, he was a painter. He wore baggy trousers and shirts with paint all over them. He wasn’t like most people. He was the man everyone wanted to know, the man everyone wanted at their parties — not just because he was different but because he was fun. Even then, I could still have fun with him, when I had time. But the thing is that in the end he went out and had fun on his own because I was too tired to go with him.

I stopped studying altogether and all I did was keep the house clean, work and make food for whenever he came in. I write this now and I am ashamed because I never asked him to do it, because I never said to him, ‘Why don’t we do this together?’ But it was the 1950s and the world was a different place. I was twenty-three and I didn’t know that things could be any other way. So perhaps some of it was my fault, my fault because I didn’t do something because I didn’t ask for help. I just carried on. You must think about this, John. I want to be fair. Think about it. When your father first saw me I looked like every man’s dream woman, I was beautiful and very, very clever. (I was also very naive — but if you’ve read this far, that won’t come as any surprise.) But after a couple of years I wasn’t like that any more. I was tired, I never went out with your father, I never dressed up for him. We stopped talking. Maybe it isn’t surprising that he stopped loving me? All because I was too proud to ask for help.