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is simply unobliging. However I suppose in due course we’ll get a letter. What was Mama’s response to the news?”
    “Well, naturally,” said my father, “her first thought—and mine—was for you.”
    I took a sip from my glass of brandy before saying in what I hoped was my most charming voice, “I assume my mother sent you to London to find out exactly what was going on in my mind. Perhaps when you return you could be so kind as to remind her that I’m thirty-one years old and I take a poor view of my mother trespassing on my privacy.”
    My father stiffened. I immediately regretted what I had said but he gave me no chance to retract those words spoken in self-defense. With a courtesy that put me to shame, he said, “I’m sorry you should find our concern for you offensive, Robert. I’m sure neither of us would wish to pry into your private life.”
    “Forgive me—I expressed myself badly—I’ve had such an exhausting day—”
    “Bearing the past in mind we can’t help but be concerned. And of course, as you must know, we’ve been increasingly anxious about you for some time.”
    “My dear Papa, just because I’m taking my time about marrying and settling down—”
    “I wasn’t criticizing you, Robert. I wish you wouldn’t be so ready to take offense.”
    “I’m not taking offense! But the thought of you and Mama worrying about me when I’m having this dazzling career and enjoying life to the full is somehow more than I can tolerate with equanimity!”
    “Your mother and I both feel that if only you could come back to Oxmoon—”
    “Please—I know this is a painful subject—”
    “It’s as if you’ve got lost. Sometimes I think it don’t do for a man to be too educated—or too successful. It cuts him off from his roots.”
    “I’m not cut off. Oxmoon’s my home and always will be, but for the moment I must be in London. I have my living to earn at the bar and soon I’ll have a political career to pursue—and it was you, don’t forget, who wanted me to go into politics!”
    “I just wanted you to be the local M.P. More fool me. I should have listened to Margaret when she said you’d never be satisfied until you’d wound up as Prime Minister.”
    “What’s wrong with being Prime Minister?”
    “Success on that scale don’t make for happiness. Look at Asquith. Why does he drink? I wouldn’t want you to end up a drunkard like that.”
    “Asquith’s not a drunkard. He’s a heavy drinker. There’s a difference.”
    “Not to me,” said my father, looking at his untouched glass of brandy, “and not to your mother either.”
    We were silent. There was nothing I could say. My father was the son of a drunkard and had endured a horrifying childhood about which he could never bring himself to speak. No rational debate on drink was possible for him.
    At last I said neutrally, “We seem to have wandered rather far from the subject of Ginette.”
    “No, it’s all one, we’re still discussing your obsessions. Robert,” said my father urgently, leaning forward in his chair, “you mustn’t think that I don’t understand what it is to be haunted by the past, but you must fight to overcome it, just as I’ve fought to overcome the memory of my parents and Owain Bryn-Davies—”
    “Quite, but aren’t we wandering from the point again? Let me try and end this Welsh circumlocution by exhibiting a little Anglo-Saxon bluntness! You and Mama, it seems, are worried in case I now resurrect my adolescent passion for Ginette and embark on some romantic course which you can only regard as disastrous. Very well. Then let me set your mind at rest by assuring you that I’m not planning to conquer Ginette as soon as she sets foot again on Welsh soil.”
    “And afterwards?”
    “Papa, I’m not a prophet, I’m a lawyer. I don’t waste time speculating about the future on the basis of insufficient evidence.”
    “Of course not, but—”
    “The one inescapable fact here is that