Lili, who I could tell understood her very well, laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘She’s called Cynthia,’ said my mother as one who says, ‘She’s called cat-sick.’

‘Ugh,’ said Lili obligingly.

There was a small summerhouse at the bottom of my mother’s garden, half wood, half glass. I used to, as my mother put it ‘curl up with a book’ on a broad shelf which ran the length of one wall under shaky moorish windows which looked out over the golf course. On the opposite shelf stood my mother’s collection of cactuses. She refused to have any pets in the house, but even the hardest of hearts need some discharge of sentiment. This usually presents as sentimentality and my mother talked to her cactuses with affection and called them sweet names. I very much resented them, because they drew my mother to what would have been a private retreat for me. Most days she would, sooner or later, walk down the lawn to examine her plants and I learned to wait until she had done this before myself settling in the summerhouse. Once I waited so long and stayed so late that I gave myself away to Syl, who had called in the usual way at the front door, to be told by my mother that I was in the summerhouse and he should go and bring me out and back to the drawing-room where, like normal people, we should converse. After that Syl took to walking from his garden along the edge of the golf course to my mother’s garden. He would look in the summerhouse before coming in by the back door but he seldom found me there now.

‘If you want to do something useful,’ my mother said to me one day, ‘you can help me propagate the cactuses.’

When bits of them broke off you had only to plunge them into the earth and they grew into new cactuses. I didn’t want to do anything useful. There were very few human beings I cared for and I cared nothing for cactuses.

‘You’re very selfish,’ my mother said. ‘If you took more of an interest in things you’d be happier.’

I knew I was selfish. I knew that people who loved God were supposed to love their neighbour too. But Syl was our neighbour.

I said I’d go shopping for her instead, and she said that that was unnecessary since Mrs Raffald had already done it. I said I’d tear out the dead Michaelmas daisies, but the gardener had done that. There was really very little I could do actively to refute the charge of selfishness. Even the local cats were, without exception, well-fed and cared for, and there wasn’t a needy creature for miles round. In order to express charity and compassion I would have to travel far, since nobody near would have thanked me for it.

‘When you’re married you’ll have to be less selfish,’ said my mother, who was particularly displeased with me on this grey, wintry morning. ‘You’ll have to brighten up.’