‘Oh, Mavis!’ Claud rolled suddenly on top of her, staring at her eye to eye. He could kiss her mouth and throat, but added now to her many layers of clothing were his own shirt and jersey. ‘I don’t believe anyone has been confronted by so much preventive clothing for years and years.’

‘I am inaugurating a new age of mysterious femininity,’ said Mavis, her mouth against his mouth. ‘You are terribly heavy and I am now too hot.’

‘Take some of it off then.’

‘No fear.’

‘New form of contraception, eh?’

‘Yup.’

‘I get it, avoidance of our helpful friend?’

‘Might be—’

Claud rolled off her. Tenderly he buttoned the overcoat up to her chin. ‘I shall start work first thing after breakfast tomorrow.’ (Susie had said Mavis’ eyes were like jade.)

‘Is Mum providing?’

‘No, I shall eat at a caff or the wine bar when I can afford it so that you can serve me.’

‘Not tomorrow. Tomorrow is market day. Your stall, remember?’

‘Oh shit,’ said Claud, ‘shit.’

Mavis pulled up the trap-door and stepped down onto the ladder. ‘I wonder what Laura really got up to in this loft,’ she said.

As Mavis disappeared Claud felt the space she had occupied flooded by Laura. Why on earth, what had possessed him to tell Mavis about his mother’s machine lovers? Surely only Laura’s ear, if any, was the one to confide in? Furiously he kicked out at Mavis’ head as it disappeared, missed.

At some point during his first night in the Kennedys’ loft, tossing restlessly on a bed new to him, Claud realised with chagrin that his hero with the second-hand Alfa Romeo would not fit the scenario of his mother’s mechanical loves. In real life Margaret Bannister used a car to reach A from B. She did not consider a car as anything other than a rather boring means of locomotion. It was with household machines that she had rapport. There was the mixer which would only work for her (I know its little quirks), the Hoover which regurgitated particular forms of dust and refused to ingest spiders, the spin drier which inspired her to raise her voice in song, the washing machine and dishwasher which were as children to be fed, each its own diet. She had, too, a pretty funny relationship with her electric whisk. Would it be possible to weave the whisk into the novel with some esoteric sexual connotation? Sexuality and his mother hardly gelled in Claud’s mind but Come on, he urged himself, I am a writer, aren’t I? I should be able to tease that idea into shape. I am not writing about my living parent, she is merely the blueprint, the toile for the garb of my story. (I must remember not to use phrases like garb for story, they are sickeningly pretentious.)