Looking back on it now, I accept that I should have expressed a bit of sympathy; twenty-eight years is a long time to be harbouring a suspicion. But it was also a period of time that had a special significance for me. I was twenty-seven; if my father and Mrs Flatman had been giving my mother cause for concern a year before I was born then all sorts of other eventualities sprang into life. Such as, for instance, that my father wasn’t my father. Was it not possible that my mother, in a fit of pique after discovering them together in an air-raid shelter when there wasn’t an air-raid, had offered herself to some other man – some army officer billeted next door, some old friend returned legless from the front, some German airman shot down over Hendon and concealed by my mother in her cellar for the duration of the war? In strife-torn Europe such things were not unheard of. Alternatively she might have been evacuated to the country where she could have made the odd gift of her honour to the odd basic farm-hand, some simple sturdy wight too illiterate to be trusted with a gun. There’d be plenty of those – wouldn’t there? – out Dorchester way. You see I hadn’t forgotten how she had evaded my questions on the day I had quizzed her about the peregrinations of my forbears. She’d been firm enough about their movements, but she’d been decidedly slippery about her own. And a little red spot had glowed inordinately in each of her normally pale cheeks when I had voiced some passing doubts as to my parentage.