Tom has got very fit laboring in the vineyards. It takes us one hour to unload and distribute the lorry’s contents. In the sitting room I survey the altered surroundings. The armchair that my curate Rick mentioned is by the fireplace. Such a mistake, we thought, when we bought it. Yvette, a small person, feared it might corner her like a rhino. She used to claim that it moved during the night. In bed she whispered to me, giggling: James, she said, I swear, we should leave the back door open. Give it its freedom. But when Tom was born it proved to be the perfect shape for nursing an infant and then later, as Rick remembered, for cradling her aching limbs. Now the rhino’s hide is rubbed raw, its back and seat welted and torn. My gaze moves on, over the swaybacked chintz sofa, the coffee table scarred by cup rings and felt-pen doodles. The gnawed legs of the rickety wooden chairs, victims of Roger, the long-passed collie dog of Tom’s childhood.

Tom’s standing behind me, in the doorway.

“Oh, Dad,” he says. “These things . . . they’re bloody tragic.”

Immediately I bristle. “They’re not tragic, just old.”

“We should have got rid of them years ago.”

I turn around. “I kept them for you. So you’d feel at home here.”

Thirty years ago, as a fugitive prisoner of war in Silesia, I scrambled up a scree slope with nothing between me and my pursuers but a stand of thin young pines. I was tracking across the slope trying to keep behind the pines. But then the scree dislodged below me and the whole face of the slope began to move downward, bearing me into the guards’ line of sight however fast I climbed. Just as I couldn’t help being seen by them, so am I unable to escape my son’s piercing stare.

“It all happened so quickly,” I plead. “The move, the job. I didn’t have time to think about the furniture . . .”

His only response is to fold his arms.

“Okay,” I say in capitulation. “So I want to keep it. Is that so bad?”

“Yes. No.” He sighs. “I haven’t a clue.” He falls silent and I say nothing. Presently he speaks again. “God, I’m starving. Aren’t you?”

“Not sure. I never really know until I see food.”

“I cooked too often, that’s the trouble. And now you’re as helpless as a baby.”

When she knew she was dying Yvette made us a cookery book, the plain facts, down to boiling vegetables. (Those that grow belowground are put in cold water. Aboveground, hot.) Over the years I left more and more of the catering to Tom.

“At least babies know when they’re hungry,” I say. “Let’s see what we can do with my camping stove.”

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