Margaret Bannister folded her newspaper and sat down. She had, while reading the newspaper, put butter and marmalade on the table and also made toast. This feminine gift of doing several things at once without being flustered had maddened his father. (Why can’t you concentrate on one thing at a time? Have you got three arms, woman?)

‘Your education is going to waste.’ Margaret spoke in derisory quotes. She buttered her toast; the scraping sound jarred on Claud’s delicate ear. Normally about as fierce as a lettuce, she sounded jaunty and crisp as she repeated the phrase, ‘Your education is going to waste,’ before biting her toast.

Assuming attack to be the best form of defence, Claud snarled, ‘Mother, you are whining. Why don’t you go the whole hog, come straight out, cast your sacrifices in my teeth? No new clothes, no holidays, no decent car, long years of pinching and scraping.’ Let her whine. Surely she would whine? What if he had come in drunk and been sick in the hall; he had cleared it up, hadn’t he? ‘I am not going to take those exams again.’ He raised his voice. ‘I do not want to become an accountant.’

‘That idea for a career was entirely your choice, as I remember. Pass the marmalade.’

Claud lumbered on: ‘I am going to be a writer and support myself until I get published by keeping a stall in the market.’

‘So you said last night. Toast?’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’ Margaret Bannister put more bread into the toaster. ‘You did.’

Keeping in profile, so that she would not get a good look at his battered eye, Claud squinted at his parent. ‘Did I say all that?’

‘Not quite so clearly; your speech was on the slur.’ His mother caught the toast as it sprang from the toaster, putting one piece in the toast rack, which she nudged towards her son, the other on her plate.

Claud ploughed on. ‘You can look the other way when you go marketing.’ He had often raised a laugh among friends at university by describing his mother as ‘poor but snobbish’. He had even sung, ‘She was poor, but she was snobbish’ to the music hall aria after a drink or two. ‘I am moving out of here.’ He raised his voice. ‘I have rented Mrs Kennedy’s loft.’

Rarely since adolescence had he been so disagreeable to his mother. Why did she not whine? If only she would whine, he would feel less awful, less like his father. There would be the justification to sprint upstairs and pack his bags (he would have to come back for his books and the heavier things).

‘You told me that last night.’ Good God, she was laughing! ‘Ha, ha, ha, hah!’ Helpless laughter! Tears of laughter. ‘Oh, Claud, if you could see yourself!’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Oh, it hurts to laugh so much, oh!’ Her laughter bubbled again. ‘It was your choice to be an accountant. You wanted security. Security!’ Mrs Bannister hiccupped with mirth. ‘We never were secure in my family, never went in for accountants, and certainly not in your father’s. Now there’s snobbery for you.’