She shook her head. I won’t go into the details of what she told me. She went into so many herself that I have already forgotten most of them. What she was most concerned to get me to understand was that she had acted as she had, done what she had done, not because she had been bad but because she had been driven. My mother had talked to me of being driven many times in the past; but always by outrage, by a fearless sense of justice, by some moral imperative, or, during the hard years, by simple poverty and want. This was the first time she had ever introduced the idea that she might once have been driven by desire. She didn’t use that word of course. She simply said that she’d been driven, flashed her eyes, and left me to put a name to the driver. The one name she did give me, though, was that of her co-passenger. ‘Menashe Flatman is your father,’ she whispered to me at last, through the steam that ascended like a mist from the swollen tea strainer.

I did some simple mental arithmetic, the kind that Menashe himself was renowned for. ‘Mother, you and Menashe have been, er, driven, for four or five years at a rough count. Now I’m almost thirty-three …’

She interrupted me. ‘Menashe and I have known each other a long time,’ she said. ‘Longer in fact then your father has known the other one.’

I couldn’t be certain whether this confidence was meant to be a further inducement to me to go to the Finchley wedding and not the Tooting; but it led me to be curious about one thing. ‘Does that mean that you drove them …?’

She interrupted me again. ‘I’m not blaming anybody. You can say that we drove one another. But there are some insults a woman cannot bear. Your father …’

This time I interrupted her. ‘Which father is this now?’

‘Barney, Menashe is your father.’

‘Does the father I’m used to calling father know this?’

She pulled a remarkable face. I’d seen some good ones from her over the years but this one was a lulu. It somehow called out from the past a scorn that was older even than I was. A thousand little lines that had been lying in wait for over thirty-three years suddenly leapt into place around her mouth. ‘What would he care whose you are?’ I watched her weighing the advisability of her next sentence, but making the mistake of delivering it anyway. ‘You’re just the same. You don’t care who brings up whose.’

I held up my hand. Asimova conversations were banned in this house. I’d banned them myself since the incident of the wardrobe – my mother’s Bay of Pigs. ‘What does it mean to say I’m just the same as him,’ I asked her, ‘if I’m not his?’