‘What did he do to me, mum?’ asked Richard, trying.

‘If you don’t remember, so much the better. You want to forget all about it, put it right out of your life.’

If only she’d let him. ‘What did he do, dad?’

‘I don’t know, Rich. None of us knows, me nor the police nor your mum, for all she says. Women like to set themselves up as knowing all about things, but it’s my belief you never told her no more than you told us.’

She took him to school and fetched him home until he was twelve. The other kids teased him mercilessly. He wasn’t allowed to go to their houses or have any of them to his. (‘You never know who they know or what sort of connections they’ve got.’) His mother only stopped going everywhere with him when he got taller than she was, and anyone could see he was too big for any Man to attack.

Growing up brought no elucidation of that dreadful evening but it did bring, with adolescence, the knowledge of what might have happened. And as he came to understand that it wasn’t only threats and blows and stories of horror which the Man might have inflicted on him, he felt an alien in his own body or as if that body were covered with a slime which nothing could wash away. For there was no way of knowing now, nothing to do about it but wish his mother would leave the subject alone, avoid getting friendly with people and work hard at school.

He did very well there, for he was naturally intelligent and had no outside diversions. No one was surprised when he got to a good university, not Oxford or Cambridge but nearly as good – (‘Imagine, all that brainpower might have been wasted if that Man had had his way’) – where he began to read for a science degree. He was the first member of his family ever to go to college, and the only cloud in the sky was that his gran, as his father pointed out, wasn’t there to see his glory.

She had died in the hospital when he was fourteen and she’d left her house to his parents. They’d sold it and theirs and bought a much nicer, bigger one with a proper garden and a garage in a suburb some five miles further out from Upfield. The little bit of money she’d saved she left to Richard, to come to him when he was eighteen. It was just enough to buy a car, and when he came down from university for the Easter holidays, he bought a two-year-old Ford and took and passed his driving test.

‘That boy,’ said his mother, ‘passes every exam that comes his way. It’s like as if he couldn’t fail if he tried. But he’s got a guardian angel watching over him, has had ever since he was six.’ Her husband had admonished her for her too-excellent memory and now she referred only obliquely to that dreadful evening. ‘When you-know-what happened and he was spared.’