‘Oh, I guess a brother would be okay,’ David answered, a momentary vision of someone who would be smaller than he, who would have to mind him, for a change.

David could not have imagined a creature so really tiny, helpless and commanding as Carl when he arrived. His fragility terrified David. It would be far too easy to kill such an enemy who nevertheless had the power to silence David as even Hugh couldn’t.

‘Not while the baby’s sleeping,’ his mother cautioned as David sat down at the piano. The little creep slept most of the time.

It was his crying which irritated Diana. ‘It doesn’t sound human,’ she said once, almost under her breath.

‘Girls are supposed to like babies,’ David said, not with rancour so much as surprise that she could dislike Carl as much as David did.

‘Girls are supposed to be a lot of things they aren’t.’

She was looking David directly in the eye. They were the same height.

‘Do you want to get out of here and go to a movie?’ David asked.

They couldn’t hold hands any longer, but David could walk on the outside. They were fourteen that winter of their peacemaking, and nothing was ever quite so hard for David again. His sister was the first real friend he ever made.

David looked down at the only line he had written and shrugged.

Even with his hearing aid turned off, David could hear the thumping of footsteps and the slamming of doors above his head, the hostile rumbling of his son-in-law, the outraged high notes of his younger daughter, Mary. If any violence occurred, it would be one-sided, Mary hurling yet another piece of family china at her husband’s head.

From the time Mary was a baby, it was like living with a faulty smoke detector. You could usually locate the cause of her tantrums, but her outrage was out of all proportion to it. Her parents’ bewilderment and increasing lack of sympathy inadvertently encouraged Mary to develop a generalizing self-righteousness to bolster her fury. If her older sister, Laura, was on the phone when she wanted to use it, Laura was always on the phone, always borrowing Mary’s favourite blouse without asking, was forever trying to boss Mary around. Laura, mild and self-possessed from the cradle, avoided Mary’s temper when she could and otherwise ignored it.

Mary’s husband, Ted, showed some forbearance, but Mary, as an adult, had improved her aim and was sometimes able to hit a source of guilt the victim generalized for himself. For Ted it was usually money. Though he made a decent amount of it, he was apt to hand it out indiscriminately like a latter day apostle.