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tempted because she didn’t spit out the usual, ‘I wouldn’t walk from here to the door knob to tell you anything.’ Turning her back, she only tugged at a cupboard door and hauled out a baking tray in a deafening clatter. ‘Here. Put your fancy gourmet supper on this. How do you want the oven, Mr Smart-Set? Hot or medium?’
    He tried again. ‘Whatever it is, I might be able to advise you.’
    â€˜Oh, yes? A penny for
your
thoughts, and you’d have to give change.’
    He fingered the wrapping round his special supper.This is my chance, he thought. I could just do it now. ‘Look,’ I could say, as calmly as if she were just one more ratty restaurateur heaving foodstuffs over a back fence. ‘I really don’t have to stay and listen to this rudeness. I’ve tried to be helpful. But since your only response is to insult me, you can sort it out yourself.’
    Then he could go.
    Go
. What a ring the word had to it.
Go!
Be finished for ever with sulks and insults. There was no point in offering advice in any case. She went her own way as a matter of principle, and, in her accounts to the neighbours, his efforts to help or explain things were always somehow transmuted into things like, ‘Colin’s been frightening me to
death
about the boiler (or the old gas fire, or the new alarm).’ Dilys is right, he told himself. No one should be expected, for love or duty or anything else, to have to put up with having their very sense of self being chipped away minute by minute. The trouble was, of course, that Mother’s self-absorption had been permitted to grow unchecked, till there was no room left for any true awareness of others. Like everyone else, she had her ready filecard of pat phrases: ‘Teachers? They’re only in it for the holidays.’ ‘Vote that lot in and they’ll be as bad as the others.’ But, with her, even the nearest and dearest weren’t exempt. ‘No, Dolly only stops by as often as she does because she likes to get away from that grisly husband of hers.’ ‘Oh, Colin only visits because I’m handy for a free cup of tea on his way home from the office.’
    But still, she seemed to have an instinct for how far she could push her luck. He heard a marshy sniff. Now that wasn’t like her. And, as she was always saying, peopleborn round don’t have the choice of dying square. So . . .
    â€˜Hot oven, please,’ he said, pulling the outer wrapping off his star purchase.
    She stabbed a fork through the cellophane cover as if it were Priding Borough Council lurking underneath, not Fifine’s Fancy Beef and Celeriac Maribou with Tomato Truffle stuffing. He pulled a chair out and collapsed on it. ‘And, while it’s heating up, you can explain why the idea of getting Mr Herbert to sign a piece of paper has put you in such a tizzy.’
    The nearest she ever came to remorse was capitulation. ‘Well, that’s just it. Old Goody Two-Shoes Herbert won’t sign.’
    â€˜Of course he will. His men worked here for
weeks
.’
    â€˜That’s where you’re wrong. He won’t.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because of the cable entry.’
    â€˜The cable entry?’
    â€˜Don’t
you
start on about it! The very words have me in hives. It seems my wiring can’t just come in the front way like everyone else’s. Oh, no, it has to come down the backs. So it runs under the lawn, and nobody’s bothered to look at it since it was put there. Holy Joe Herbert has made it perfectly clear he can’t sign my certificate until I’m upgraded.’
    â€˜If this cabling’s so ancient, why on earth didn’t the fellow have the sense to get his men to replace it while they were here?’
    She slapped on her innocent face, then, clearly deciding it wasn’t worth the effort, told the truth. ‘I wouldn’t let them.’
    â€˜Why on earth