Together the mother and I began to look through the evidence of the so-called experts whose advice I had sought. In each chapter there were some small elements of truth, but in general what we both found striking was how much they got wrong. In fact we were shocked at the erroneous analysis offered, the kind of advice that they must also be offering – usually for money – to vulnerable clients seeking their advice. As we sat there going through the book, I thought how surreal and intrusive it must feel to read such a strange and unsolicited in-depth analysis about your own character and life, let alone such a misguided one!

The psychoanalytic psychotherapist had wondered whether the mother and child had perhaps been too close, and it seems she had been right about the bond between mother and son. The husband was not mentioned in the letter, not because he did not exist but because, she explained, the letter was not addressed to him. It was addressed to Maurice, or at least to the rest of the world, the sea, the universe. ‘All this stuff about the son becoming a substitute for all her emotional and erotic needs – theoretically he becomes the phallus . . . this is all rubbish,’ said the mother in a tone of outrage. All the talk of rupture, alienation, breaking attachments, conflicts – this was all false. ‘I was never in conflict with my son at all. We listened to music together, we did painting together. The therapist must have transposed her own conflicts onto my relationship with my son. And she thinks there are no other men in my life, but with a husband and three other sons, she is very wrong. The only part she was right about was that I had been in therapy’. Turning to her companion with a gentle smile she said, ‘Look, she thinks I have turned away from men . . . Not at all,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Not at all.’

The boy had been killed cycling in a simple and horrible twist of fate. A disastrously extended domestic chore which meant that the parents were out for longer than expected buying a new TV had led indirectly to a terrible road accident. No one was to blame, no one had in any Lacanian way facilitated events. It was just one of those terrible things that fate flings out.