‘Suppose I had been a belly dancer?’

I’d asked the doctor that question before I came out of the hospital and he had laughed.

‘Get away with you, woman,’ he had said.

He then explained that, had he carried such thoughts about my life and career in his head, he, at great expense, could have found a surgeon who would have done a job of invisible mending second to none.

‘At great expense,’ he said again.

‘Naturally,’ I said to him.

We understood each other.

‘Just take care, Clara.’ He held my wrist in his cool fingers as he spoke. ‘Don’t laugh too much for a couple of weeks.’

To give him his due, he has kept his mouth buttoned; he has not told my mother the full and nasty truth as to why I had to undergo such butchery.

I wonder if I do stand on the edge in the hope that the wind will do for me the job that I am not prepared to do for myself. I hope not.

I don’t think I have any desire to step or jump, or even fall out of life. The fact that I don’t think much of it at the moment doesn’t mean that there are no surprises left to come; even the simple pleasure of the early-morning smell of the distant sea through my bedroom window gives me a momentary nudge each morning. I am glad to be able to say that.

My mother, who is getting old and filled with anxieties, says that I shouldn’t sleep with my bedroom window open; this is because I live in a cottage, and sleep on the ground floor and she believes implicitly that i will one night be murdered in my bed by some drug-crazed teenager. This fear, I think, sums up her attitude to modern life.

I often wonder if my mother was ever young. I have no recollection of girlishness in her at all, no giggles or flirtatiousness, no petulance; her passions have always seemed to be for order, harmony and a sort of family loyalty that from time to time makes me want to throw up. Her face and body have become lined and wrinkled, softened with age; she has grown smaller, even some of her grandchildren are now taller than she is, but her personality does not seem to have changed at all in all the years that I have known her. But then perhaps I have never really known her, just someone called mother.

I know she would like me to sell my cottage and move in with her. Sometimes she offers to send Patty, her cleaning lady, round to give my place a good going-over. I always refuse politely but firmly.

‘I like it the way it is,’ I say to her and she sighs.

‘I rattle round in all those empty rooms,’ she said to me just after I had come out of hospital.

‘Sell it,’ I advised. ‘The way things are at the moment you’d get a fortune for it. Buy something smaller. Dumb down.’ An expression she had never heard before.