I must have looked horrified because Julia’s face changed and she made a pained expression as though she’d said exactly the wrong thing and wished she could take it back.

‘We don’t have to talk about the letters now! I have this terrible habit of saying things as they come into my head. I’m always going too far.’ She smiled broadly and resumed her attack on her meat. I’d never seen a woman eat meat with such relish.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure it’s a great idea to publish the letters. You know, my father’s still alive, for one thing …’

She nodded, but it wasn’t a nod of agreement.

After lunch, back in her office, Julia sighed and sat down behind a desk piled high with proofs held together by rubber bands. She was about thirty, I guessed. She seemed incredibly old and incredibly sophisticated. But her office reminded me of the feminist collective office at university: dominated by a corkboard covered with slogans, a facsimile of the face of Virginia Woolf (yes, I knew who it was), book cover mock-ups with names like ‘My Body, My Church’ and ‘Incursions into Femininity’. On the wall was a strange naïve horse painting by a local artist called Jenny Watson and a delicate paper collage by someone called Elizabeth Gower.

‘Want to meet me for a drink this evening, Owen?’ Julia said, apparently flippantly. ‘There’s a very interesting lecture on at Trades Hall. They have a great bar there. I’m obliged to go. Speaker’s a friend of mine. Well, acquaintance.’ She laughed a burly laugh that was out of keeping with her slightly prim good looks. ‘Might be interesting for you. It’s a feminist lecture.’ I didn’t say anything. She laughed again, gathered up some papers and thrust them at me. ‘Here. Early proofs. Veda Gray.’

I sat in a chair and leafed through the proofs of Mother’s book while Julia rearranged things on her desk and listened to messages on her answering machine. Mother’s poems were alien to me. I didn’t know if I liked them or not. I was a discerning reader, I thought—like other young ‘educated’ men of my time, I had read a little Proust and a little Joyce and probably too much Hemingway—but I didn’t know whether my mother’s poetry was any good, or whether Julia and her press were making a big mistake they’d later regret. The poems seemed to me to be about things poetry shouldn’t bother itself with. Small things. Domestic things. I flicked through the proofs, noticing a misplaced comma, a hyphen where an en-dash ought to have been, an inconsistency in spellings, and pointed them out to Julia. She was impressed. ‘Owen! Do you want work? I need a proofreader.’