Laura showed her teeth; she had her back to the light and might have been smiling, it was difficult to tell. ‘Have some cake.’ She proffered the plate. ‘That’s not mouse shit, it’s seed cake,’ she said as Claud hesitated.

‘No thanks.’ He recoiled.

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘since you are here we’d better brave the doppelgängers.’ She reached for a pair of tights hanging on the fireguard and began putting them on.

Claud observed her legs; they were long and peculiarly neat. Her movements as she pulled the tights up over her bottom had a sensuality which brought the word risqué to what he was beginning to think of as his writer’s mind. ‘I would like to seduce you,’ he said. He decided to give his heroine Laura’s body. She had already, he realised, got Mavis’ hair in his writer’s mind’s eye. He had become aware of Mavis and the smell of her flesh in the wine bar, but he had been taken up with Laura, and later all he had seen of her was the enormous overcoat; she had even hidden her hands in its sleeves. ‘I would like to seduce you,’ he repeated.

‘Fancy that,’ said Laura, picking up the telephone and dialling. ‘I am coming round,’ she said as someone answered, ‘to explore the attic.’ Then, ‘You’d put in a bit of practice before tackling Mavis, would that be it?’

Claud did not know what to make of this. ‘I don’t know what to make of you,’ he said. Surely at this juncture any woman of Laura’s age would laugh and say, I am old enough to be your mother, or words to that effect.

But Laura gave him what that morning he had called her sidelong look. ‘Just concentrate on Justin,’ she said. ‘And what is his lover’s name to be?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’ Quickly he dismissed the name he had been toying with, it would never do. Pearl must be dropped back where it came from. Indeed later when he tried to remember the name he could not and even believed it might have been Fleur, or perhaps June.

Laura tugged at her boots. ‘Coming?’ she asked.

With his back to the light Claud poured tea from the pot his mother had placed before him. His eye was extremely painful, his head throbbed. Beside the teapot his mother had put a bottle of aspirin. The scene revived memories of the times before his father left home, driven away by his wife’s intolerable forbearance.

Claud unscrewed the aspirin bottle, tipped pills onto his palm, gulped them down with scalding tea, drained the cup and refilled it. My pa, he thought, was an incurable alcoholic; he did not last long after leaving Ma’s tender care. Perhaps if they could have had a hearty row, a healthy shout when he came home drunk, he would be alive to this day? But I was not roaring drunk last night, Claud told himself. I am not an alcoholic. On the other hand recollection of what happened in the Old Rectory is dim, if not zero. ‘I think I got a bang on the head,’ he said as his mother rustled the sheets of her newspaper. ‘I probably have a slight concussion.’