A hysterical telephone call from my mother started it off. She wasn’t going to tell me what the matter was, not when some operator who might know us could be listening, but she wanted me round there right away. She understood as well as any mother that I had my own life to lead and she would lie bleeding in the gutter rather than disturb me, but this was urgent. Actually she didn’t use the word urgent, she used the word strange. ‘Something very strange is going on here,’ she said, so I rushed round immediately expecting to see the dining-room table floating a foot above the carpet.

The front door was opened for me by Mr Flatman, which in truth was strange enough. ‘Your mother’s quite distressed,’ he told me. ‘I’m glad you’ve come.’

I’d never paid much attention to Mr Flatman. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he could be an obstacle to my passion for Mrs Flatman. He was one of those nondescript Jewish businessmen, bald-headed, bespectacled, with a little silver moustache, who allow their wives to dominate their social lives while they burrow away in the background, buying and selling blocks of real estate and keeping docile mistresses. They are capable of great sentimentality in the secret hinterland of their lives, these commercial city Jews, often giving their hearts and a fair proportion of their fortunes to wasted widows or paraplegics or mortally struck asbestos victims. It seems to be necessary for them to find some soothing contrast to the blooming health of their wives and daughters. Whether Mr Flatman spent his private life crying in a cancer ward I didn’t know. All I knew about him, and I got this from my parents, was that he owed his success to a phenomenal gift for mental arithmetic. ‘If I could keep in my head one-tenth of what he keeps in his,’ I recall my father once saying, ‘I wouldn’t still be slaving over television licences.’ ‘You’re slaving over birth certificates,’ my mother reminded him.

Since Mr Flatman had never demonstrated his remarkable facility to me I’d had no opportunity to marvel over it, but he certainly remembered who I was, treated me with kindness, and seemed genuinely concerned about my mother. I hadn’t forgotten either, come to that, the giant jig-saw he’d bought me while I lay in bed mindlessly convalescing from my marriage to Sharon. So I was in the main predisposed towards him, even though I wasn’t certain that he was the right person to be letting me into my parents’ house and telling me he was glad I’d come.