‘I’m only spoiling you like this,’ lied my mother, ‘because when you’ve got a home of your own you won’t have time for breakfast in bed.’

I sat up so that she could put the tray on my knees. She brought me breakfast in bed to ensure that I was awake and wouldn’t spend the morning half sleeping in frowsty, tumbled sheets.

I said, like the child who had played with the dolls and bears, ‘Syl would bring me breakfast in bed, only his mother wouldn’t let him.’

‘I certainly hope you wouldn’t expect him to,’ said my mother. ‘Syl is a busy man. No time to make breakfast for a lazy wife.’

She picked up my underclothes from the floor and laid them on a chair. ‘I just wish you’d pull yourself together,’ she said half-despairingly.

But I knew what was really worrying her at that moment. It was the mention of Syl’s mother who lived in his house and showed no intention, although she was nearly eighty, of ever dying. My mother frequently inquired after her health and was constantly disappointed. ‘She’s wonderful,’ Syl would say, ‘got the heart of a sixty-year-old.’ He seemed not to dislike her, which was odd since apart from him all who knew her were united in this emotion.

‘You’ll hardly have to see her at all,’ said my mother, voicing her worry tangentially, ‘in a house that size.’

‘We’ll have to eat together,’ I said in a doleful tone which I knew would upset my mother as much as the vision which my remark would conjure up. These petty revenges were my only source of pleasure, pallid though it was.

‘Of course you won’t,’ said my mother, almost squeaking with exasperation. ‘Why on earth do you think Syl went to all the trouble of making her a separate kitchen?’

Syl had indeed done this. He had taken the pleasantest, south-facing rooms of the house and turned them into what he described as a ‘suite’ for his parent.

‘I could hardly expect her to eat alone,’ I said. ‘Poor old lady...?’

But I had gone too far. My mother glared at me suspiciously and told me not to be so ridiculous.

Already the satisfaction of teasing her had faded. While I spoke like that I could pretend that Syl and his house were unreal and my projected presence in it merely an extension of that fantasy, but the wedding loomed ever closer like a rock and I, poor ship, was about to founder on it. I had had a sudden image of Syl bringing me breakfast in a bed which we had shared, and I heard myself saying aloud, ‘No!’

My mother who had reached the door turned to look at me.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just thought of something. It wasn’t anything.’

My mother was the sort of person who regards talking to yourself as the first sign of madness.

‘What you need is a couple of babies,’ she observed. ‘That’ll give you something to think about.’