‘And you expect me to help you eat yourself alive!’ Sarah cried.

‘Don’t shout at me,’ he said shakily.

‘You’re the one who’s shouting,’ she shouted, although she knew it wasn’t true. But her newfound power gave her an almost magical insight into the terrors he lived with. ‘Worse than that: you expect me to eat out my own insides for you. And why? Because next year, just maybe, but it’s only a vain hope, hopeless really, not even vain—’

‘Shut up,’ he said, catching at her wrists, holding them tight in his hands.

‘Don’t touch me! Let go of me!’

He tightened his grip.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she screamed.

He didn’t move: he didn’t dare.

‘We’re not people anymore,’ she went on, still screaming and as relentless as George had been all those years ago in the Stokes’ sod hut. ‘Let go of me! We’re some kind of perverted sub-human form, some insect with only a mouth, a stomach and an ass-hole. Let go!’ She struggled in his arms. ‘All that waits for us is babies and death. We’re like worms or grubs or slugs, wretched, crawling, dung-covered – Tell me, Johnny, can you sink lower than this? Can anybody? Are you satisfied? Let me loose!’

When the control is let loose, it’s an eerie sensation. There’s a sudden white in the brain and a sudden vacuum in the chest. Jonathan heard the crack his hand made across her face before he was even aware he was going to strike her. He stared at her wildly, then ran out of the room. As he slammed the front door behind him he caught a glimpse of the small figure of Rayner, on his knees beside Sarah, who lay sobbing on the floor. When I was a child myself and Jonathan long dead, long past forgiving or being forgiven, I remember my father saying, ‘The old man hit her. He beat us kids. Nothing special in that, though: most kids got whipped in those days. But he shouldn’t have hit my mother. For that I will never forgive him.’

And yet my father hit my mother once, too – only once, just as Jonathan hit Sarah only once. It happened after the sound of battle had changed in that final, fatal engagement. But this time was different from all other times. I knew it. Usually a wild coupling followed, grunts and whinnies from the marital bed. This time there was silence instead. Then a scream. My sisters and I opened the doors to our rooms and peeped out. My mother was naked – middle-aged flesh curdling on her thighs – barring the way to the bathroom door. As we watched, my father hit her, hard; before our very eyes the weal rose on that pale, sagging flesh. He threw her down, out of his way, crossed the threshold, took the bottle out of the medicine chest and shoveled handfuls of nembutal into his mouth, swallowing as fast as he could. With each handful, pills scattered on the floor. When he’d emptied the bottle, he stood there looking at himself in the mirror. My mother called the police; a squad car arrived, siren screaming. And still my father stood there – my father, Jonathan’s eldest son – he just stood there in his red paisley robe like a cardinal’s and stared into the mirror. So it was that he destroyed his kidneys, raised his blood pressure and caused the stroke that felled him: so it was that he provided me with the wherewithal to keep me in as much comfort as a person in my condition can be kept.