The shadow of the tall building dulled the colours of the tagged flowers in the front garden. When I opened the gate the latch gave a clank loud enough for a doorbell. It could easily have alerted someone, but the house was so quiet that except for seeing Julia’s car on the road I might have imagined the place was deserted. More likely someone was lying in wait, since I felt observed. I had barely rung the bell when the door was snatched open. I thought Bella might have sprung the trap, but Julia confronted me. “We’re about to have dinner, Patrick.”

It was plainly not an invitation, although I could have taken the aroma of Asian spices for one. No doubt she’d made a vegan feast on Bella’s behalf. I saw her have a second thought, which didn’t lead to hospitality. “Who are you going to pretend to be now?” she said.

“Me.” This was both a statement and a protest at the question. “I’m not the one who—”

Before I could finish she turned her back on me to call “It’s your father, Roy.”

The announcement sounded no more welcoming than her initial greeting had. The kitchen door opened at the end of the hall, and Bella was first to appear, carrying two glasses. Roy was behind her with another glass and a creaking plastic bottle of red juice. He looked no happier to see me than Julia and his companion did, though Bella’s face outdid theirs for blankness. “What do you want, dad?” he said.

“I don’t know why people keep asking me that sort of thing. The answer has to be the same until it’s done.”

“I’ll ask you as well,” Julia said.

“I need to speak to everybody while I have you all together.”

Julia’s face withdrew even more expression, and then she stepped back. “I need to do that too,” she said. “Come in but don’t expect to stay long.”

Roy looked not far from dismayed as I crossed the threshold, while Bella betrayed a smile too faint to admit defiance. “Just put those on the table,” Julia told them. “We’ll go in the front room.”

Cacti were arranged in the order of their dwarfish stature along an ornamental mantelpiece as roughly stony as a desert. Cushions importing patterns from Mexico squatted on a pair of chairs and on the couch, where they framed a stack of gallery catalogues and studies of Thelma’s work. When Roy and Bella took the couch I wondered if they meant to join hands on top of the books. I sat on the chair Julia had left unoccupied, opposite an extravagant television screen like a blackboard waiting for a lesson to be chalked on it. “Just say what you told me before, Roy,” his mother said.

His grimace almost shut his answer in. “Which?”