My mother beckoned me to her. A gesture of infinite sadness. She put her hands on my face and looked into my eyes. I felt a sudden spasm of discomfort and even distaste. I’ve always been like that; if I get close to a member of my family – physically close, eye to eye or cheek to cheek – I instantly lose all sense of who either of us is. I go into a kind of swoon. It’s like being unravelled or unborn. Perhaps that’s the real thrill of incest. A plunge not into the heat of consanguinity but into oblivion. And perhaps that was what Hardy was after from his cousins: the sensation of an even greater ghostliness than he already knew.

Who on earth is this person, I found myself thinking, as my mother kept up her stare into my face. It’s possible she was wondering the same about me. Or would have been if her grief had not got in her way. It certainly seemed to be the only thing on her mind. ‘What I can’t forgive,’ she said, ‘is what this is going to do to you.’

‘Mamzarim,’ Mr Flatman muttered.

‘What’s what going to do to me?’

She looked at the ceiling. Mr Flatman looked at the floor. ‘Chazerim,’ I heard him curse. ‘Zey beyde pishen in der zelber grib. A klug af the pair of them!’

I might have been slow, but for the first time it occurred to me to wonder why my father wasn’t here to share this family sorrow, whatever it was. ‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked.

Something clicked in my mother’s throat. I was close enough to her to hear it plainly. When she spoke again her voice had changed. But she hadn’t just lowered her range, she had descended in an instant from the empyrean of opera seria to the bare boards of opera buffa. ‘He’s done a bunk,’ she said.

‘Hopped it,’ added Mr Flatman. He was now standing at my mother’s window, looking out into the night. ‘Vamoosed, skedaddled, gone aroys.’

I didn’t have to ask with whom.