“I know. But I could do worse.”

“What worse, Daddy?”

“I could drink before breakfast.”

“I drink before breakfast,” she said. “You’re silly, Daddy.”

“So I am.” And so I was, I thought; why mention these things to a four-year-old child at all? And why had I? The truth was that I actually wanted a drink now, I wanted something to blur things slightly, to put a haze between me and the pink wallpaper and the pink cupboards and the white refrigerator and the electric oven and the mixing machine and the pink wall-table and the pink-covered stools; it was too bright and shiny and hygienic at eight o’clock on a March morning with Harling Crescent quiet under the weight of Sunday, it reminded me rather too coldly that I was thirty-five and father of two children and at least ten pounds over­weight.

I sat down and pulled Barbara on to my knee. I wasn’t shield­ing her any more; she was shielding me. I didn’t know what she was shielding me from; I only knew that as long as we could be so close together nothing really bad could happen to me. She sucked up the last of her orange juice noisily, put the mug down on the wall-table, and said: “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, too,” I said.

She kissed me and said, without alteration in her tone: “Harry’s had his breakfast, he has. He’s gone birdwatching.”

“Good luck to him,” I said. I looked around the kitchen; there was no dirty crockery, not even a crumb to show that he’d eaten a meal there. He was unnaturally tidy for a boy of ten; at his age every room I passed through looked as if a hurricane had hit it. Thinking of him eating his breakfast alone in the kitchen here, I felt obscurely that somehow I had failed him; I should have been with him. My own father had taken me for a walk every Sunday morning of his life; but my home had been with my parents, not with strangers. But Harry had to go through the middle-­class sausagemachine; which was in this case the St. Clair sausage­machine; his prep school had been chosen by his grandmother, just as his public school would be.

The kettle was boiling; I put Barbara down gently and made the tea. Warm the teapot, bring the teapot to the kettle, one spoon­­ful to each person and one to the pot; but now there were refinements, one experimented with different blends, the latest being two of Hornimans’ Directors’ to one of Twining’s Earl Grey. And Susan drank hers with lemon and without sugar. This would be one of the topics of conversation today either at my in-laws or Mark’s; it was all part of the campaign to make me lose weight. When the tea had stood for three minutes I poured myself a cup, put in five spoonfuls of sugar and filled up the tea­pot with hot water. I drank it quickly and rinsed out the cup; it was a small triumph, almost as stimulating as a double whisky would have been.