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a drink to await the daily visit of her son, whom she worshipped and indulged, as did every woman with whom he came into contact. After he had gone she would make a few telephone calls, heave herself from her chair, apply a new layer of powder, and take the lift to another flat for an evening of bridge.
    This seemed to satisfy her perfectly. Her life, though restricted, had the merit of being self-contained, and apart from her painful love for her son she had no passions that could not be satisfied. If there were no food in the flat she did not eat. If she were extremely hungry, as I suppose she must have been from time to time, she simply turned up at the door of one of her bridge-playing friends—deeply enthusiasticelderly men, women as distracted as she was herself—and plaintively demanded a cup of coffee. When I got to know her better I realized that she could eat for two days at a time. She was an opportunistic feeder, putting away amazing quantities of whatever happened to be around and then lapsing vaguely into her gin and cigarette routine until another meal happened to come her way. After I married Owen I got into the habit of taking food round to her flat, but she regarded this as insulting and left it in the fridge in the kitchen, to go bad. She preferred to drop into our house, poke around in the kitchen, and demolish two very large slices of apple tart if it happened to be on the table, swinging her tiny legs all the while and making up her face immediately afterwards. The adjusting of her curls under the spotted veil signified the end of the day’s ingestion of nourishment and the beginning of the evening’s entertainment.
    At that first meeting she manifested a friendliness which facilitated conversation but did not entirely warm the atmosphere. She was not a disarming woman, although she was an accessible one; she gave the impression that she knew all about men, having discussed them at length with any number of women, but the tight mouth and the lonely eyes told another story. I later learned that she came from a family of runaway husbands: her own father had defaulted, before her husband, Henry Langdon, got himself mixed up with another woman, was forced to abandon his legal practice, and moved to southern Spain, where he still lived with his mistress, being neither sadder nor wiser for the experience. Mr Langdon was only mentioned swingeingly and with disgust, although Vinnie lived quite comfortably on the alimony he paid her, and had insisted that he abandon all claims to the marital home in Gertrude Street, where Owennow lived, Vinnie having thankfully decamped to Swan Court and the eternal bridge game that was to be her only occupation. All this I learned much later. What impressed me straight away was the hunger with which she looked at her son, so much so that she paid me little attention, thinking, perhaps rightly, that I was one of many and would soon be discarded. Since she was clever enough to realize that Owen might be irritated and embarrassed by the intensity of her love she disguised it with a number of flirtatious routines. When she left the room she would pause in the doorway, kick one leg back behind her, and, with a radiant smile, say, ‘Don’t let them start without me. I’m just going to change.’ Five minutes later the lavatory would flush and she would be back, rubbing cream into her hands and twisting her rings back the right way.
    I was intimidated by her at that first meeting, for I did not see how she could be anyone’s mother. She was unlike any mother I had known, my own mother being shy and self-effacing, and Mrs Savage, Millie’s mother, who came down from Manchester from time to time, being a charming highly coloured woman, with her daughter’s lovely smile, who would give us tips on how to make ourselves attractive to men, how to brighten our hair, where to wear scent, and so on. All of this we knew, of course, but we thought it generous of her to try to enter our