‘Oh, you weren’t girly,’ Mum said with a wave of her hand. ‘It’s just you looked a little different. And you were a bit – gentler than the other boys.’ She reached for the sugar and dropped a heaped teaspoon into her cup. ‘I remember one day you came home with a girl’s belt on! Lord knows where you got it.’ She blew on her tea and chuckled. ‘You can only have been four. Red it was, with a white buckle. You wouldn’t give it up for all the tea in China! I had to hide it from you, in the end.’ She shook the tin with the woven handle towards me. ‘Biscuit?’

I didn’t respond. I’d forgotten the details of the belt, but I did remember Mum taking it away. I’d cried to have it back, and she’d told me that people would think I was like a little girl, if I cried over such a silly thing as a belt. And I remembered that she’d held me by the arm, hard, and shaken me, the belt jiggling up and down in her other hand.

She chewed a digestive, then put her cup down. ‘Is something wrong, son?’

‘Then he is like me.’

‘Who is?’

‘Robert.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He’s like me.’

‘Of course he is! He’s your son all right.’

‘He’s a sissy, like his dad.’

‘What?’ Mum looked into my face. ‘What are you talking about?’

I fiddled with the handle of my teacup. ‘I was feminine.’

She let out a loud hoot. ‘But it wasn’t anything – anything serious – that thing with the girl’s belt. Of course not.’ She smiled for a moment. ‘I knew I didn’t have anything to worry about, with you.’ She pressed a hand, still warm from her teacup, onto mine. The skin on her knuckles was lumpy and white, as if it had been moulded in plasticine.

Her cuckoo clock chimed five. I realised my hands were aching again.

She stood up and began to rinse her cup in the sink, her thumb squeaking on the side of the china. ‘You haven’t touched your drink, Howard.’

I flexed my fingers. They were long and thin, hairless, freckled. Despite years of gardening, I’d never let myself have dirty fingernails. I wondered what was wrong with me.

‘It’s bucketing down,’ Mum said, staring out of the window. ‘Perhaps you’d better stay. We can have our tea together. Do you want to phone Kathryn?’