‘He brought you up, didn’t he?’

I suddenly felt very warmly towards my father – that’s to say towards the one who had brought me up. I wished he was here, just back from the office, running through the day’s freshest examples of parental spite: Gerda Loines and Marie Baddeley and Ilona Gayne. I couldn’t summon up any such enthusiasm for Menashe, despite his stupendous memory for my mother’s name. I’ve said that they have sentimental secrets in their lives, these arithmetical city businessmen with their silvered moustaches; but I was damned if Menashe’s sentimental secret was going to be me.

I left Finchley almost as speedily as I’d left it on the day I very nearly found Asimova in my old wardrobe. I didn’t bother looking in at Tooting. I knew exactly what I’d find there – Rabika Flatman taking unscrupulous advantage of my long-standing passion for her, and my father – utterly confounded by his family’s clamour for individuation – distantly amused by something or other, and largely indifferent to Rabika and to me. That, I decided, was the quality I most liked in him. He had never bothered to get to know me and had never encouraged me to get to know him. He had not been icy, he simply had not been very interested in relationships. How tactful of him, if I wasn’t his son, not to have attempted to make me think I was; how civilized of him not to have tried to make me his. No wonder I was fond of him.

So it wasn’t necessary for me to see him again before I left. I knew what I wanted to know. It was best – just in case I was tempted into some last minute backsliding – to get away quickly. I didn’t want to catch myself asking who or whose I was again, just for old times’ sake. Not in Finchley or in Tooting anyway. The cliffs were far and away the best places for that sort of thing. There’s a democracy of familic confusion out on these Cornish headlands – nobody else knows who he is either.