I was staying with an aunt and he used to come and see me.

I suppose I loved him, anyway we were married. There was a cottage right down in the country that Jeez got his hands on, near Alton in Hampshire. It was only a couple of bedrooms, pretty primitive, that's where we lived. He once said the colonel had helped him find it… Fill me up again, Jack."

He took her glass to the drinks cabinet in the living room.

Three cubes of ice, six fingers of tonic. She wouldn't notice.

"He was born in 1933 and we married in '57, and I was nineteen. It was lovely down there, cress beds, trout streams, nice pubs, walks. Jeez didn't see much of it. He was up in London when he wasn't away."

She stopped. Her hands fondled the cut glass tumbler.

"He was very close, didn't talk about his work, only said that he was a clerk up in Whitehall. He called it a soupedup secretary's job."

She had never before talked calmly to her son about his father.

"Jeez used to take a train up to London, most of the year before it was light and come home in the evenings most of the year when it was dark. I didn't ask him where he went, he didn't tell me. He just said that what he did was pretty boring. He'd be away about half a dozen times a year, most often for about a week, sometimes as long as a month. I never knew where he went because he never brought me anything back from where he'd been, just flowers from Alton on his way home. Lovely flowers. Sometimes he looked as though he'd been in the sun, and it was winter at home. It's hard to explain now, Jack, but Jeez wasn't the sort of man you asked questions of, and I had my own life. I had the village, friends, I had my garden. There wasn't much money, but then nobody else round about had money. Then I had you.. ."

"What did he think about me?"

"Same as with everything else, you never really knew with feez. He used to do his turns with you at weekends. He'd change you, feed you, walk your pram. I honestly don't know what he felt."