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months pregnant to me, though logically I supposed it wasn’t possible. Gregory always liked visibly pregnant women; he said they were a heavenly sight. As I expect they were, in his line of work. I’d always tried to avoid meeting Ruby. She gave me a bad feeling. Inadequacy, I think.
         I reckoned that, with a name like Gonzalez, the chances were she had Catholic origins. Gregory was a lapsed Catholic. Well, you have to be pretty lapsed to perform abortions, don’t you. He said he was thinking of making Dr Gonzalez a ‘member of the team’.
         ‘Don’t you think she looks like the Virgin Mary?’ I asked him, remembering the way she’d sat once, in her blue-and-white clinician’s garb, with sloping shoulders and upraised palms.
         ‘Yes,’ he said, with a strange, soft smile. ‘It’s funny you should say that, because it’s her nickname at work.’
         So someone else had spotted it, too, that weird resemblance she had to the mother of Jesus.

TWO
    Dr Stern sent his letter to Linda. It was a short note to say that our mother, Mrs Moira Sugden, was entering a ‘crisis period’, and could the family refrain from making any unexpected visits over the next two weeks, as she was always ‘agitated’ after seeing blood relatives, and any kind of shock could ‘precipitate a mental emergency’. Linda came round and read it to me aloud, in a censorious voice, her clever steel eyes cutting through the text. She was wearing one of her frumpy frocks and a huge brooch of Ma’s, and her winter hat, which she bought in Leningrad, on a package tour of the Soviet Union, as was. Despite the cuddly headgear, she was all spikes. Even after all these years, and all we’ve been through with Ma, my love for Linda is no more than a bad habit. The proof of it is that I can’t get to like her much: I’ll make an effort to, and she’ll spoil it.
         ‘It’s all your fault,’ she accused. ‘I’ve been visiting her twice a week for months on end, and then three days after you decide to show up at the hospital, this happens.’ She slapped the letter in disgust. ‘What does he mean ,’ she complained. ‘How can anyone get agitated after seeing blood relatives?’
         With Linda trembling with righteous fury in front of me, dragging on her cigarette like she was giving it artificial respiration, and scraping at my pine table with her car keys, I knew exactly what he meant. She never fails to agitate me. But I offered her a coffee.
         ‘Instant please,’ she said. ‘It’s quicker. I have a lunch meeting.’
         And she blushed a frantic, beetroot red. This meant only one thing; a man in her life. At a guess, someone she’d met at one of her gawkish Mensa Club get-togethers, where members bring their own sandwiches.
         ‘What are you staring at?’ she asked. ‘Is instant not posh enough for you?’
         Linda, the girl no one loved much, except Ma, who sort of love-hated her, which is worse.
         I was too young to be a person when our dad left to live in New Zealand with a floozie of loose morals whom he’d met (according to Ma) at a petrol station near the flyover. But when he walked out with his one suitcase and kissed Linda goodbye on the doorstep, it hurt her a lot, because she was old enough to think it was her fault, and my mother was strange enough, even then in the days when she wore pinnies and rolled pastry, to encourage her to think that too.
         Dad worked in double glazing, but he had plans to move into the conservatory and greenhouse market. He’d worked on a project for a pagoda of glass in Jaycote’s Park which was to be the pride of Gridiron, but it came to nothing. He had a fondness for stock-car racing and was a great attender of carpet auctions, where he once obtained in great bargain quantities some rolls of carpeting which had fallen off the back of a BBC lorry. From then on, our living-room floor in the Cheeseways was tattooed all