Ever was relieved that when he was ten he was put into Wildwood School in Los Angeles for a year. A bold move and a good one, during another period of success for his father. Ever loved it as the primary consideration was not education: but for the children to be happy. But the most exciting thing for him was that he didn’t get bronchitis. It was his mother who always battled to spend Christmas in England. Both Ever and his father could see the sense of staying in the comparative warmth of Santa Monica but his mother didn’t really care. Her way was the way.

She was a short woman, quite plump but with a pretty pre-war type face, although she was born five years after the end of the Second World War; her face always maintained an out-of-date traditionalism in its looks. Her name was Dorothy, no middle name, just the one, his mother often stated a resentment towards her parents for their lack of effort, in that they never came up with two names, at least the gift of a middle name.

‘That’s all you want in life is choice.’

That’s what she said, it was a kind of her mantra, she applied it to a lot of things. She hated the name Dorothy. Ever agreed that it never seemed to represent her, or suit her; she was more contemporary than the name implied. But she drank a lot, which she did in front of him and his father; there was never any one else around. There was what she thought to be secret drinking going on, a bottle of gin, kept under the bed, but Ever knew and his father had always known, she probably knew they knew and just didn’t care. The mornings would find her in the kitchen, grumpy, with a hangover, then around midday it was time for a ‘little drinky’, spoken with her welsh lilt in the hope that it would provide a distracting charm. Then in the evening she would state she would ‘only have the one’. But in fact, she had kept herself topped up from under the bed during the course of the afternoon. Anyway she never just stuck to ‘the one’.

Ever always felt a sadness for his mother, she never appeared, unless drinking, to extract any happiness from life.

He was seven years old when she sat him on her lap and said that he was the only reason she was staying alive, that she didn’t kill herself.