‘Well, then I should have married some gypsy who would have trodden all over the fire with his bare feet,’ said Lili. ‘One with earrings and a spotted scarf.’

‘I thought Robert was the only man in the world for you,’ observed my mother.

‘He is,’ said Lili. ‘I was toying with fantasy.’

‘You do too much of that,’ said my mother, putting the kettle on. If she had seen the man I loved she would have thought him a figure of fantasy too. Foreign, unsuitable. And, I admitted to myself, she would have been absolutely right.

‘When is Derek coming?’ asked Lili, perhaps because we were on the subject of husbands.

‘The night before the wedding,’ said my mother without much enthusiasm. ‘We’re having drinks here in the evening.’

‘No stag night for Syl?’ asked Lili.

‘Of course not,’ said my mother.

‘I suppose he’s a bit old for that sort of thing,’ said Lili, ‘although with that ridiculous car he drives he does seem to be trying to give an impression of boyish insouciance.’

My mother ignored this, while I felt myself flush with vicarious embarrassment. Syl went out of his way to preserve a semblance of youthfulness, wearing his clothes untidily and even eating in a haphazard fashion as though he wasn’t quite old enough to have learned proper manners. He liked to be the centre of attention and would sulk in any gathering where people talked and laughed without him.

‘And you must go to confession,’ my mother told me.

I knew that.

Our Irish priest was not a person I felt I could unburden myself to. He was quite aware of my childish misdemeanours, but I hadn’t been to confession since I returned from Egypt, and I thought he would be profoundly shocked by what I should have to tell him. He came several times a year to have a glass of sherry with my mother and I always felt awkward in his presence, fearing that instead of ‘Would you care for an olive?’ I might remark ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’. At the sight of him I would smell the dust of the confessional and remember the mixture of boredom, shame and relief as I said my penances. I was familiar with the view that the priesthood is beyond shock, being entirely cognisant of the whole sum of human folly and evil from the outpourings of the penitent, but I wasn’t convinced. I also had a feeling that my mother would never forgive me if she thought I had admitted to fornication and worse to a person who came to her house and drank her sherry. I sometimes thought that the social considerations of people like my mother militated more against religion than atheism or simple sin. I had discovered in Egypt what seemed like a different religion: a thing of unimaginable heights and depths, of light and shadow with none of the vertiginous darkness of which Lili had spoken. Now that I was home, my religion seemed compounded of polite appearances and the prospect of eternal hell. It was unfortunate, I thought, that at the same time as I had realized the grandeur of God I had fallen in love with a mortal, and that the two experiences should have proved to be mutually exclusive, leaving me with the sensation that I was being sundered by equal forces. Destroyed.