My head was staying in my hands. It seemed the best place for it. “Well, you’d told your parents so I was worried that you’d think if I hadn’t told Mum it would mean, I don’t know, something.”

“It means,” Mum said, “that Oliver is a better son than you are.”

I looked up. “Then that’s fine. Because you’ve got him now.”

Mum considered this. “That is a fair point.” She sat down on the sofa and put her arm around Oliver. “Luc, this is Oliver, he is my son. He is a very nice boy, he has a good job and always calls his mother. Oliver”—she gestured contemptuously at me with her free hand—“this is some ungrateful shit who sometimes comes to my house and eats my curry and complains about it.”

“Mum,” I protested, definitely not sounding like a teenager. “I’m really sorry. There’s been a lot going on recently—”

She tossed her head. “How would I know? You never talk to me.”

“I talk to you all the time. I just didn’t mention this one thing.”

“To be fair,” put in Judy, “it is quite a significant thing. I told my parents about most of my marriages.”

“You see,” exclaimed Mum. “And Judy was a terrible daughter. She gave her father three heart attacks.”

I sighed. “Fine. I’m a terrible son.”

“You were a terrible son,” Mum corrected me. “Oliver is my son now.”

Oliver had a faintly panicked look in his eyes, a look that was slowly spreading to the rest of his face. What he still didn’t quite get about my relationship with Mum was that we sort of upset each other all the time, sometimes over huge things like, um, me not telling her I was getting married, sometimes over tiny things like whether the guy who used to live next door to us when I was twelve was called Jim or John. It was just that it didn’t mean anything because she was my mum and, despite what she was saying right now, I was her son and we loved each other and always would.

“I don’t think it’s a trade,” he said. “I think it’s more a jointly and severally liable kind of deal.”

Mum smiled beatifically. “Oh, it is so nice having a son who is a barrister. He always says intelligent things instead of insisting the guy next door used to be called John.”

“Hang on”—I actually jumped to my feet in a moment of strong emotion—“I never said he was called John. You said he was called John.”

“I did not say he was called John,” Mum insisted. “I said he was called Jim because that was his name. But you never listen to me as well as never telling me anything.”

“No, you didn’t. You said his name was John, and you remembered specifically because of the Beatles.”