Even the robes I made for him were not quite right - too light, too heavy, too sturdy, too flimsy. ‘It will do well enough for the steward,’ she would say, ‘but surely not for Odysseus.’

Nonetheless, she tried to be kind to me in her own way. ‘We’ll have to fatten you up,’ she would say, ‘so you can have a nice big son for Odysseus! That’s your job, you just leave everything else to me.’ As she was the nearest thing there was to someone I could talk to besides Odysseus, that is I came to accept her in time.

She did make herself invaluable when Telemachus was born. I am honour bound to record that. She said the prayers to Artemis when I was in too much pain to speak, and she held my hands and sponged off my forehead, and caught the baby and washed him, and wrapped him up warmly; for if there was one thing she knew as she kept telling me—it was babies. She had a special language for them, a nonsense language ‘Uzzy woo,’ she would croon to Telemachus—when drying him after his bath ‘A google woogle poo!’ and it unsettled me to think of my barrel-chested and deep-voiced Odysseus, so skilled in persuasion, so articulate, so dignified, as an infant lying in her arms and having this gurgling discourse addressed to him.

But I couldn’t begrudge her the care she took of Telemachus. Her delight in him was boundless. You’d almost have thought she’d given birth to him herself.

Odysseus was pleased with me. Of course he was. ‘Helen hasn’t borne a son yet,’ he said, which ought to have made me glad. And it did. But on the other hand, why was he still—and possibly always thinking about Helen?