‘Read a book by a man,’ she said, adding severely, ‘and I don’t except Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina and you will find that he has put breasts and a silken skirt and long-lashed eyes and lustrous hair on himself and filled his poupée with his own desires.’

I was sure that my mother neither understood nor agreed with what Lili was saying, but the mention of these classic works of literature compelled her to reveal at least her knowledge of their existence. She wasn’t going to let her old classmate get away with showing off.

‘I never really cared for Madame Bovary,’ she said, ‘but Tolstoy is another matter.’

Lili ignored her. ‘No man,’ she said, ‘has ever portrayed a woman as she truly is.’

Robert spoke mildly. ‘And no woman,’ he said, ‘has ever been able properly to portray a man.’

‘I know that,’ said Lili impatiently. ‘Why should she bother?’

‘There’s never been a great woman composer,’ said my mother with an air of triumph, not because she delighted in this deficiency of her sex, but because she thought it percipient to have noticed.

I wanted to say that women, since they uttered human beings, had no need to make a noise, that all the bluster of music was a sad cry because the world was unevenly divided, but I couldn’t think of how to put it. I had always felt embarrassed and had to look at my feet in the presence of anyone playing any musical instrument, and had realized once when watching Syl spitting and squinting at his oboe that this was because it was irresistibly evocative of masturbation.

‘People look silly playing a musical instrument,’ I said.

‘You’re silly,’ said my mother, getting angry because she wasn’t used to converse of culture. She had had precisely the same expensive education as her friend and would never concede that she was not as clever.

‘You talk tripe sometimes,’ said Robert to his wife.

I wished that I could talk well, and could continue this conversation until animosity was dissipated and we could all stand on some common ground, but I knew enough to admit that this wouldn’t happen, and that the longer the talk went on the further apart we should all grow.

Lili and I should talk alone. She showed no inclination to argue further, but lay back in her chair, smiling at Robert, and I saw that it was not, as I had believed, understanding and acceptance that her smile revealed, not that their marriage was so secure it could sustain itself in the face of any disagreement, but that Lili could afford to be pleasant because she had no scruples. I knew that tonight she would make love to another man. If Robert knew it too, as I thought he must, he seemed not to care. Perhaps it made for a safer relationship if, instead of arguing to a standstill, the party who felt herself misunderstood took her grievance elsewhere and satiated it in transgression. I was thinking, in contravention of everything I had been taught, that this casual immorality would be more wholesome than the hidden hatreds of marital strife. Everyone was amazed when my father left, but when I came to consider it I had been relieved. He had taken with him more badness than goodness, leaving not a vacuum, but a breathing space.