But when I rang up my mother a dozen times the next day and got no answer, and when a postcard from Positano arrived through my letterbox a few days after that, hoping I was not still taking it too hard and signed Mum and Menashe, and when I put it to myself that if I could ever find her again I would, after all was said and done, prefer to be slashed to ribbons by Gertrude Bugler than kneed in the groin like a GI with a crewcut by Rabika Flatman, then the massed rights of grievance and jealousy began to break up and disperse. In fact we were all all right. I was less all right than they all were but I was all right too. In truth I was proud of my father and wished him well. I hoped for his sake that Mrs Flatman was still athletic enough to swing from something high for him, wearing only her bikini bottoms. I would even have gone to see them both in their love nest in Tooting – they had actually taken rooms in the very house that Hardy had lived in when he wrote A Laodicean and thought he was dying – were it not that a phrase of my mother’s kept going round and round in my head and eventually prevailed over my instinctive generosity. ‘I wouldn’t dream of saying a word against him to you, his own flesh and blood,’ she had assured me towards the end of that dreadful night, after she and I and Menashe Flatman had got thoroughly and miserably drunk together. ‘And the last thing I want is to sour the love you feel for him with my bitterness. But you ought to know this before you go: your father is a sadist!’

Such an accusation, I maintain, dragged out of a wife only by the acuteness of her shame and delivered against a backdrop of such domestic dereliction as was ours, would have come as a shock to any son. But for me, made sensitive by recent events, my mother’s words carried an extra charge. Drunk as I was, I thrilled to my very finger tips. I asked her to tell me what on earth she meant, but she refused to elaborate. I begged her for some clue then, some small yet all revealing intimation, but she shook her head very slowly, as if it were heavy with memories of unspeakable acts, destined to remain unspoken. ‘Between a husband and a wife,’ she reminded me, ‘some things are sacred.’

‘Even when the husband is a sadist,’ put in Mr Flatman.