On the way out I ran into Rabika Flatman. She didn’t live next door to my parents any more but she visited them regularly. She must have been getting on for fifty now and therefore, according to my sense of things, still some way off her prime. I have never shared Hardy’s horror of ageing beauty. I suppose there must come a time when women’s looks stop improving, but I can’t trust a man who thinks that that time is around their eighteenth birthday. I’m not certain, either, that women ought to be the victims of the lunatic vagaries, the precariousness and the fragility, of male romanticism. Years after he had stopped gurgling into her silken flounces, when he was just tall enough to turn a door knob and just old enough to be given the vote, Hardy called on Mrs Martin in London and reeled from the shock. Her looks – my God, her looks! Ruined! What she thought of him, her fastidious child lover, standing stammering on her doorstep, with his lip out and his man’s hat under his boy’s arm, we can only surmise. But a thrashing wouldn’t have gone amiss.

What Mrs Flatman thought of me (with whom a thrashing also wouldn’t have gone amiss) I have no idea. I saw her no more than once or twice a year and I found even those infrequent meetings difficult. I could never be certain that she wasn’t going to ask me for her photo back. That might have been why I reddened the moment she began to speak to me. That and of course the bubble of mockery on her lips. The impression she had always been able to convey that she knew something about me that even I didn’t, was as strong still as it had ever been. But what was it that she knew? And when was she going to destroy me once and for all by telling me?

I could wait, but not forever.

‘How’s Sharon?’ she asked me today.

‘Very well,’ I answered.

‘No sign of any children yet?’

I went scarlet. This was a direct reference to my reproductive organs. ‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘Well, I suppose you’ve got plenty of time.’

I misunderstood. I thought she wanted to keep me talking. ‘I haven’t,’ I said, ‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘Where are you going? Somewhere nice?’

Where was I going? ‘I’ve got to check my birth certificate,’ I said. And if she looked startled, who could blame her.

[3]