“Yes,” I reply, startled. “May I speak to Tom Acton?”

“One moment. I will fetch him.”

A creaking, rumpling sort of sound, and a lot of gruff throat clearing. It doesn’t sound as if the young woman has to go very far to find him.

“Hello?” says my son, deeper, hoarser, but recognizably him.

“Tom, dear boy!” I burst out. “You’re back!”

“Dad!”

A shout of delight. My heart sings.

“Is this a convenient time?” I say, still smiling.

“That was Florence,” says this husky young man of mine. “She’s . . . she’s with me.”

“She has an excellent telephone manner.”

“Yes. That was the first thing that struck me.”

“Tom . . .” I can hear my front door opening, a hubbub in the hallway. Rick my curate is admitting the Bible study crowd. “While you were away, I . . . I decided to leave Fulbrook.”

“Leave—Dad, is everything okay? They haven’t defrocked you for stealing the silver?”

“No, I’ve got a new parish. A village called Upton, in Hampshire.”

He whooshes a long breath of surprise into the receiver. “Hampshire, that’s miles . . . that’s a different whatchamacallit, isn’t it?”

“Diocese, yes. I’m moving in a couple of weeks.”

A pause. Behind him I hear the muffled, beseeching tones of Florence.

“Look,” he says finally. “We’ve got to split . . . Tell you what. Term doesn’t start till October. I can help you. Pick me up at Southampton and we’ll go to your new place together. You helped me, after all.”

He means when we drove to the University of East Anglia a year ago, at the beginning of his first term. Two hundred and fifty miles eastward with a shiny kettle and crisp new duvet in the back of the car. I was all for blankets but he insisted on a duvet. Nobody had blankets anymore, apparently.

“That’s very kind, Tom . . .”

“Come on, Dad. It’s the least I can do.”

Suddenly magnanimous. We’re two men now, I understand. Equals.

—

Toward the end of my time in Fulbrook I gather my friends and colleagues together, open many bottles of wine. They leave late, a little tipsy, with torrents of kind words and embraces. “You are a rotter, James,” says one dear, wild-haired female friend, hitting me softly in the chest with a jingle of bracelets. “An absolute rotter, to leave us all in the lurch.”

“There’s no lurch about it, Maureen,” I reply, laughing, because the parish is in such safe hands.

“Oh, yes there is,” she says, and wanders unsteadily away down the path.

On the eve of my meeting with Tom in Southampton, I load up a hired removal lorry with the help of the curate Rick and a couple of burly parishioners. We set about our task, starting with the most cumbersome objects. It’s a job and a half.