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It’s a charming flat. Your father never complained, even though he sometimes had to sleep there for nights on end.’ Duncan blanched, wondering if she were genuinely ignorant of his father’s affairs or feigned judicious blindness. ‘I used to tell him that he had printer’s ink for blood. But he was always a gentleman. He had standards.’
    ‘Yes, Mother, standards that almost bankrupted the company: standards I’ve been paying for ever since.’
    ‘No, not living standards,’ Adele said fiercely. ‘Moral standards. There were certain subjects he would never permit to be mentioned in the paper.’
    ‘You mean like “Local Businessmen in Crooked Deal” or “Council Chief Accepts Backhander”? And why? Because they all played golf together or hobnobbed at the races.’
    ‘No, like “Café Owner Fined for Asking Woman to Breastfeed in Toilet”.’
    ‘It’s the law, Mother. The woman had a perfect right.’
    ‘There were children present. And Muslims. You’re the one who’s always telling us we should be sensitive to other cultures.’
    ‘Now you’re being ridiculous. We simply reported the story; we didn’t print a photograph of the breasts.’
    ‘First you embarrass your readers; now you’re embarrassing our guest.’
    ‘Hardly,’ Duncan said, although a glimpse of Henry staring at his empty glass unsettled him. ‘What’s the Synod line, Vicar? And has it changed with women priests?’
    ‘I was just wondering,’ Henry said, ‘whether being banished to the café loo might be the modern equivalent of “No room at the inn”.’
    ‘No, it might not,’ Adele retorted. ‘It takes five minutes to prepare a bottle. But these women are out to shock. They’re as bad as the nudists at Salter Cove. No wonder there’s all this sexual perversion in the woods – forgive me, Henry,’ she said, mistaking the nature of her offence.
    ‘Now you’ve lost me,’ Duncan said.
    ‘It’s easy enough to blame the men and it’s true that they lack self-control, but are they entirely at fault? Time was when women maintained an air of mystery. Now everywhere you look there’s flesh. And not only flesh but bodily functions. Breastfeeding. Childbirth. Of course the men are so put off that they turn to one another.’
    Duncan was astounded, as much by the fact of his mother’s theories as by their tenor. Further discussion was prevented by the return of Chris, who cleared the plates and brought the dessert. ‘Queen of Puddings,’ he said, looking straight at Henry.
    ‘My favourite!’ Adele beamed. ‘Bang goes my diet!’
    ‘You know what they say: a little of what you fancy.’
    As he listened to their banter, Duncan marvelled once again at his mother’s ability to compartmentalise her life, exempting from her strictures a man whom he presumed to be no stranger to ‘sexual perversion’, albeit in the comfort of his own home.
    After lunch, they returned to the drawing room where Chris had set out Alison’s tennis trophies. Duncan wondered if his sister welcomed the reminder of her teenage triumphs or if, were she ever to pay an impromptu visit, she would be relieved to find them locked away. Every burnished cup and shield bore the dent of unfulfilled promise. Even in the cut and thrust of women’s tennis, few careers had collapsed as spectacularly as hers. She had always been superstitious, whether lining up her dolls at bedtime or listening to Janis Joplin’s ‘Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)’ when preparing to sit an exam, but what was an innocent quirk elsewhere became a burning obsession before a match. She wore the same skirt for years after a surprise victory at Eastbourne and whistled the first two bars of the
Doctor Who
theme whenever she left the changing room. Most crucial of all was that she tapped her foot every third or fourth step – he forgot which – when coming out on court. In the 1986 Wimbledon semi-finals, a noise in the crowd distracted her and she lost count. Her game fell