I found my mother in her bedroom, propped up with cushions in a high-backed white and gold boudoir chair and dressed as if for the opera – a tragic opera, that is, whichever one has got Medea, Dido, Ariadne and the Trojan Women in it. I have said that she was hysterical on the telephone but I ought to explain that hysteria in my mother’s case never issues in common tears. It is marked, the rather, by a heightening of colour and diction, by an extravagance of vocabulary and gesture, and by a triumphant air of vindicated fatalism. She slowly turned her head towards me on my entrance and with a great roll of her eyes gave me an intimation of her woe. When I say she was dressed for the opera I don’t mean that she was dressed to go to one.

‘For myself I don’t care that much,’ she said, snapping her ringed fingers above her head. ‘In so far as the only one to suffer might be me, it doesn’t concern me that far.’ She blew imaginary dust from her grand brocaded bosom, sending an aroma of scent and powder – the aroma of my childhood – into my nostrils. ‘I have never expected happiness or sought it, so why should I complain that it has eluded me?’

I was surprised to discover that Mr Flatman was in my mother’s bedroom with me. ‘Rachel,’ he said – he had followed me up the stairs and was continuing to show off his phenomenal memory for names as well as figures – ‘Rachel, don’t talk like that. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’

She waved away his interruption, but I noticed that she didn’t wave away him. ‘I’m not what’s important,’ she went on. ‘What happens to me is not worth –’ I could see that she was looking for some other part of herself to snap or cuff so that I should be given further proof of the low esteem in which she held her own life and person. It was only when she couldn’t find any that she allowed one round, perfect, opalescent tear to appear in the corner of her eye.

‘Mother,’ I asked, ‘what’s the matter?’

Mr Flatman was pacing the floor. He had an altogether coarser conception of agitation. ‘What’s the matter?’ he repeated. ‘What isn’t the matter?’