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he did not tell his mother about Rosalind when he went home after his finals. Not that there was much to tell: just a week after that night she had gone away for several months, first on holiday with her parents and then on a French course, staying with an aunt in Lyon. She had promised to send a postcard. Back in the damp hallway in Dover, with the cooked-cabbage smell and the snoring from room three, he thought he had been insane to think she could be a part of his life. That shining girl—here.
    'D'you want scrambled or fried?' his mother said. She was doing the breakfasts. There were five staying.
    'Fried
,' he said, loading all his disappointment into that one word.
    She moved over to the fridge for the eggs, her slippers flapping on the lino. 'God—what's the matter with you? Don't have them if you're not hungry—no point wasting it.'
    'No—I am hungry, Mum,' he said. 'I'm really hungry.'
    'I mean, I don't know what you're used to now.
Cereal
probably.
Orange juice
.' She almost shuddered.
    'No. I want the eggs. I really want the eggs,' he told her.
    She had decided they didn't eat proper English breakfast at university and that he had developed a hatred of this staple part of his upbringing. No amount of reassurance would convince her—particularly since he had come home underweight after the stresses of his finals.
    She did eggs fried, scrambled, boiled or poached. An American man had once made the mistake of asking for an omelette. Bacon, kippers, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, he recited to himself. Tea, coffee, milk, sugar. Staring at the pattern on the plastic tablecloth, tracing his finger over it, he remembered that he was the person who had written the answer to question 14a in the jurisprudence paper, and his heart beat hard with excitement. He knew he had done well. It was like an electrical storm contained in his chest. He was going to be a barrister.
    He watched his mother putting a row of tomatoes under the grill and slipping the toast into a rack with the other hand. He knew her movements by heart. It was always four steps between the fridge and the hob. Slap, slap, slap, slap—and then the thunk and clink of the fridge door opening.
    'You're not drinking up your tea,' she said. She turned and put one hand on the sideboard, reaching for the cigarettes in the pocket of her apron.
    I am.
    'If you don't want it, Alistair, you don't have to. I don't want you thinking you have to.'
    'I
don't.
What's the matter with you, Mum?'
    She picked up the ashtray and slammed it down again. When she was angry you could literally see the rage jump into her eyes like a wild animal on a nature film. It filled the screen. 'Don't you talk to me like that!' she said. 'Don't you
ever
talk to me like that. You come here with your head full of ideas about yourself, thinking you're too good for the place you grew up in—not bringing one of your Oxford friends to visit the whole time
out of shame.
And now you talk to me like this!'
    And this was his first morning home. All he could think of when he observed her was how different this angry, weathered woman was from Rosalind. How long had he hated her without admitting it to himself? Suddenly he could not separate her from the suffocating fug of her kitchen, the cooking-fat smell, the crazed sound of the kettle whistling. He stared at the veined hand splayed on the plump, aproned hip and wondered how often she had stood in that pose at the bottom of the stairs, calling him away from his desk—'Come on, Al, you're supposed to be young. What do you want to waste a day like this for with those old books?' Always calling him away from his desk. He saw that now. It had taken Rosalind—the purity and order he imagined she would bring to him—to make him see it: his mother had been trying to sabotage his life!
    She stubbed—or, rather, crushed—out her cigarette and looked right at him. 'Who do you think you are, Alistair?'
    'I don't know, do