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Mr Fenix next door and good neighbours opposite. You have a landline and a mobile phone. You are only sixty-two and there is nothing wrong with you.’ Even six months ago he couldn’t have summoned the strength to say that.
    â€˜Nothing wrong with me!’ The words were repeated on a note of ironic laughter. ‘It is extraordinary how one’s good little children can grow up so callous. When you were first put into my arms, a tiny child, after all I went through to give you life, I never dreamed you would repay my suffering with this kind of treatment, never.’
    â€˜I’ll get Marion on the phone for you, shall I, and you can ask her?’
    â€˜Oh, no, no. I can’t become dependent on strangers. I shall have to bear it alone. Please God I won’t be ill.’
    In the event, Edmund left for Clapham on Friday but only after more battles. Irene ‘went down’ with acold the evening before. It was a real cold. Unlike acid indigestion, which needs only one’s word for it, sneezes and a running nose cannot be faked. Irene pointed out that it was only three weeks since she had had her last cold. It was a well-known fact that ‘cold upon cold’ was the precursor of pneumonia. She had had it as a child as the result of a series of colds,
double
pneumonia.
    â€˜You aren’t going to get pneumonia, Mother,’ said Edmund, the nurse.
    Discouraging whisky toddies, he made her a honey-and-lemon drink and advised aspirin every four hours. ‘You’re not a doctor,’ she said, as she so often did. ‘I ought to be having antibiotics.’
    â€˜A cold is a virus and antibiotics don’t work against viruses.’
    â€˜It will be a virus all right when I get viral pneumonia.’
    Irene Litton was a tall, well-built woman, having much the same sort of figure as Heather Sealand. Edmund had noticed this and refused to draw the psychologist’s conclusion, that he was attracted by women who looked like his mother. In any case, the resemblance ended there for Irene’s hair was dark, barely yet touched with grey, and though English through and through, she had much the same features as Maria Callas: large, aquiline, striking. She was aware of this herself and had been heard to say that she might have had the same operatic success if she had only been able to have her voice trained. She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colours, wine-red, sapphire, deep-green or purple, mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high. Her usual good health suited her type and she was at her worst when red-nosed and sniffing.
    Marion noticed at once and poured out sympathy. She had arrived just before Edmund left for the weekend – timed her arrival, he thought, for he was sure that his mother had invited her, in spite of her avowals that she had not. That she knew where he was going and with whom he was also pretty sure of, for while they were alone together in the hall, before she danced in to see Irene, she gave him a look of deep reproach, half smiling, yet sad. ‘I brought some of my own-make fairy cakes,’ she said. ‘Fairy cakes have come right back into fashion, you know. They’re such comforting food and she’ll need comfort.’
    When he had walked down the path and let himself out of the garden gate, he looked back to see them both watching him from the bay window. Those women were sure to make him the principal subject of their conversation, thoughtless, immoral, unfilial, callous and not a doctor. His ears ought to be burning all the evening. He was determined not to let thinking of it blight his weekend and it didn’t.
    Letting fall the beige damask curtain and returning to the fireside – a realistic-looking gas fire of smouldering yet everlasting coals and logs with flickering flames – Marion bustled about, feeling Irene’s