To complete my morning’s misadventures the phone was ringing when I got in, and when I picked it up I heard my mother saying, ‘Hello darling, you’re sounding much better today.’

So it looks as though I must accept the opinions of witnesses who are unlikely to have conferred: I am getting better.

My mother, of course, although she was exquisitely tactful and understanding and even (by her standards) reticent initially, is now actively willing me on to good health. I can detect a sort of preternaturally positive cheer-leader quality in her voice, whenever I speak to her, as if, over the air waves, she is rallying my genes or corpuscles or whatever it is that can make me strong again. She hasn’t liked my grieving over Camilla. It isn’t personal – she didn’t get on with Camilla on the one occasion they met, that’s true – but she wouldn’t have liked me grieving over any woman. ‘You’ve sacrificed the best years of your life to girls,’ she stung me by saying on the phone only last week. ‘You’re a big disappointment to us,’ she even tried, during the same conversation.

I didn’t ask who ‘us’ meant. The environs of the personal pronoun are pretty treacherous territory up in Finchley just at this moment. My parents’ and the Flatmans’ divorces are now through, but there are occasional ruptures of the new alliances, followed by abrupt and baffling restorations of the old, and in between times complete outsiders, total strangers as far as I can see, briefly assume positions of importance. The clearest picture I can get is that Mr Flatman is, in the main, a regular companion of my mother’s now – they had a week in Ibiza together only recently, and they’ve been back to Positano countless times – but he isn’t always the other half of what she means by ‘we’. It referred for a while, for example, to herself and a visiting American rabbi who was already married to someone else. ‘Can rabbis do that?’ I asked. I was genuinely surprised. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. I could hear my mother trying to decide whether she had enough credibility left as a matron to deliver the line, ‘Do what, Barney?’ I think I must have waited a full five minutes before I heard her say, ‘He’s a reform rabbi, Barney’, instead.

It’s not likely, therefore, that I was a disappointment to him; reform rabbis, from what I’ve heard, don’t bruise easily. Just who it is, then, that I am a disappointment to, remains in some doubt. Unless it is Asimova.

It was Asimova, as usual, that my mother wanted to talk to me about today. ‘You should see her,’ she said, as part of the same sentence in which she told me how much better I was sounding. ‘You should see how big she is now.’