My problems were not yet over. I had evicted the hot-wine waiter; my mother was coming to scrub out my balcony. She aimed an unfriendly blow at me with her mop.

I smiled at my mother, a serious mistake.

“You’ve been with one of your rope dancers!”

“I have not.” I captured the mop. “Sit down, share a cup of wine, and I’ll tell you what the famous Titus Caesar says about your glorious son.”

She did sit, though she rejected wine. I told her how Titus had praised Festus, laying on the compliments fairly thick. She listened, with no change that I could see, then sombrely requested wine after all. I poured; we tilted cups in his memory. She sipped in her usual way, sitting very upright, as if she merely drank to be sociable.

My mother’s face would never age. Only her skin had grown tired in recent years, so it no longer fitted properly on her bones. After I came back from Britain she seemed smaller than before. Her black-rimmed eyes would stay bright and sharp-witted to the day she died. One day that would happen, and though I now spent so much effort fending off her encroachments, when she was gone I would be desolate.

I sat quiet, letting her absorb all I had said.

No one, not even his girlfriend, ever criticized what Festus had done. My mother had received the news, heard his self-sacrifice hailed, ensured decent arrangements were made (by me) for Marina and the child. People talked about him; she never said a word. We all understood that losing that great, gaudy, generous character had swept away the underpinnings of her life.

Now, alone with me, quite suddenly she told me what she thought. When I made the mistake of calling him a hero, her face set even more. She drained off her cup and fiercely banged it down.

“No, Marcus,” my mother said harshly. “Your brother was a fool!”

And at last she could cry, for Festus and his folly, in my arms, knowing I had always thought so too.

From that day it became accepted that in the presumably permanent absence of my father I came into my full authority as head of our family. To cope with that, ageing a generation seemed a good idea.

L

In the early afternoon I revisited Nap Lane.

Nothing had changed: the rubbish in the alley, the desolate air of neglect, even the sewermen doggedly lowering hods down the same manhole as before. Round the warehouse itself there were men of a military disposition stationed everywhere. Their scratchy-featured captain refused to let me in, though he did so with good manners, which suggested someone whose rank he took seriously had warned him I might call.