Naturally she was pleased to have me back under her care. I created a diversion, for one thing, from her agonising suspicions about my father and Mrs Flatman, now entering – her suspicions that is, not my father and Mrs Flatman – their twenty-ninth year. And for another she was pleased to be given the opportunity to build me up after my long lean years in exile. She was no different from all other mothers (how could she be?) in that while she wanted me, in a general way, to be married, she didn’t want me, in a specific way, to have a wife. Every time a son leaves the woman he has married – the details of the dispute are immaterial – he makes a decision in favour of his mother. What’s a marriage for a man anyway, but Mum’s brave little champion carrying the fight into the very territory of the enemy? Mine looked ten years younger the minute she opened the door and found me bleeding on the doorstep. ‘I wish you and Sharon didn’t have such serious disagreements,’ she remarked. ‘One of these days one of you is going to really get hurt.’ But she wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned about the dents in my skull or the ear that hung on a thread from the side of my face. I honestly think that the first thought to cross her mind was how long it would take her to ring all her friends and get them over for a party.