‘He spat at me,’ Jonathan said indignantly. And indeed he had, that very afternoon.

When I was a child, the fights I went to sleep with night after night had the same rising and falling rhythms this one has. My father Rayner took his opening role from his father Jonathan; he began cool, controlled, in command; his professorial manner gave him great elegance. In his final fight with my mother – the one that ended with the bottle of nembutal – a new neighbor, unused to the shouting, frightened by it, knocked at the door. My father answered. He wore a red paisley robe that hung to the ground like a cardinal’s cassock: ‘Surely you can see, my friend,’ he said to the neighbor, ‘that the woman’s hysterical.’

Sarah pushed Jonathan away as vehemently as she’d pulled him to her. ‘What use is a sensitive boy to you?’ she said. ‘All you want is field hands.’ She slapped her belly. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a calf instead?’

‘You don’t mean what you’re saying.’

‘Wouldn’t a calf serve you as well? Wouldn’t it? Say something! Why don’t you answer?’

‘Because you’re not making sense.’

‘We were going to corner the market in soft fruit.’

‘And so we will—’

‘Corner the market! Five years of solid labor and we can’t even afford a team to pull the plow. We don’t get a calf because babies are cheaper.’

My mother’s and father’s fights were foreplay; they built up to a verbal climax before the grappling began that was to end in its own furious bedroom excitements. This anticipatory violence was of the dish-throwing sort. One time my father threw a glass of iced tea across the room (I remember the smash it made, glass and ice all over the floor); another time – mad as hell, and strong as only farm boys are strong – he tore a telephone book in two. Jonathan was different. He showed his anger for the threat it held, much the way an army on parade shows off tanks and artillery, but he kept his control.

‘I think it’s time to stop this,’ he said, dismissing her and the squabble. ‘You are saying things you will regret. Next year will be better.’

‘Next year! What about this year? Bare walls, bare windows. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Remember the pelmet, Johnny? Remember? And the piano? I want a piano. I want—’

‘Bring yourself up to the present, Sarah.’

‘—I want curtains. I want—’

‘Enough is enough!’

‘I want wallpaper. I want a Christmas cactus in a pot. Remember the Christmas cactus in a pot? Do you? Remember? Even the poorest of the poor have something pretty in the house—’

‘What’s wrong with this house?’ he said, his voice a shade icier but no more than that. ‘I built it with my own hands.’

‘This is your house. It’s not mine. It has nothing to do with me. And it’s ugly, ugly, ugly.’

‘Of course it’s your house. Where else is there for you to live?’