This is not the house where it happened—the farmhouse. That was badly burned. The police say my father and I were lucky to get out alive. That was the first time I heard myself described as lucky after the rape, but it wasn’t the last. I was lucky to be alive, lucky not to be more seriously injured, lucky not to be pregnant, lucky not to have contracted AIDS. I had never been so lucky in my life.

This is a new flat my father bought after the fire. It is convenient for his golf club and for the shops and the theatre. He employs a housekeeper who cooks and cleans for him. My father is sixty-nine years old. He was in his early forties when I was born. I am used to having the oldest father.

Today he looks young. His skin is plump and rosy. The thinning thatch of hair on his head appears thicker and more luxuriant. His shoulders have widened, and his waist has narrowed. The dressing gown and slippers he was so prone to wearing in the daytime are nowhere to be seen. Instead he is wearing cream trousers (he would call them slacks: slax) and a pale-pink golf shirt with a crocodile stitched over the pocket.

“Come in, child. Come in.”

He holds the door open and stands back to let me pass. He presses a kiss onto my forehead, but his eyes don’t hold mine. He hasn’t looked me steadily in the eye since that night. My shame hangs between us like a carcass on a butcher’s hook.

My father’s flat doesn’t have an old-man smell. My nose prickles with detergent and polish—smells that have become uncommon in my own home. My house is the one that smells as though it belongs to an elderly person. My father has furnished his new home with the bachelor trappings of a much younger man. One wall of the sitting room is entirely taken up by a flatscreen television. I can see a PlayStation console peeking out behind it.

“So! How are you?” His eyes flick towards me and skitter away again. “I mean, this week. How was your week?” Asking me how I am opens an existential maw neither of us wants to deal with. My week is much safer.

“My week was okay,” I say. “I had quite a lot of proofreading work and even one editing job.”

“So you’re keeping your head above water?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.”

My father has never urged me to finish the rewrites on my PhD, even knowing how close it was to completion. He never had one himself, although he was officially working on it when he took early retirement from the university after the misunderstanding with the female student. I think it is easier for him if I am perpetually working on mine too.

“And how was your week?” I ask.

“Sherry?”