I helped her off with her coat. She was wearing what was for her a closely fitting dress of black nylon jersey; briefly, despite her grey hair, something about the line of her back reminded me of Susan. I was surprised to feel not hatred or pain, but a kind of physical affection.

She sat down on the sofa and folded her hands in her lap.

“I expect you’re wondering why I came,” she said.

I smiled. “I’m sure you won’t have any hesitation about telling me, will you?”

She stared at me. “Is that what you think?”

“You’ve come to tell me how right you were about me. Haven’t you? You’ve come to give me what your sort calls a tongue-lashing, haven’t you? I’m only surprised that you haven’t come before. And where’s your husband? Can’t he do his own dirty work?”

“He wanted to come,” she said. “But not for the reason that you suppose.”

“For Christ’s sake don’t give me that.” It occurred to me that everything I said was given a strangely disembodied quality by the fact that there was no name that I could bring myself to address her by.

“You needn’t blaspheme,” she said, coldly.

“All right. But tell me what you came to tell me. You needn’t bother about sparing my feelings. Nobody else does.”

“It’s difficult,” she said. “It’s difficult. Because you’re so wrong about me. And Abe, too. You always were.”

“Was I?” I lit a cigarette. I had rehearsed this conversation many times: but now that she was here I seemed to be missing all my cues. “You may as well tell me what you came to tell me. But it won’t be a surprise to me.”

I took a drink of whisky from the glass beside me. “Your hus­band’s fixed it up with Tiffield so that I won’t get a job with him. And he’s passed the word around elsewhere so that I won’t get a decent job anywhere. And it’s entirely my fault that Susan was unfaithful to me, because I’m so low and brutal and rotten. And the house and everything else is in her name. And you’re going to hire a good lawyer and she’ll get custody of the children, and you’ll see to it that they forget they ever had me for a father—”

I stopped. I had spoken of myself as my children’s father – and so Barbara’s father – to Norah and had felt nothing. But now looking at my mother-in-law’s white face I couldn’t go on.

“Come here,” she said.

I sat down beside her. She took my hand.