Nothing untoward seemed to be happening. It looked as if he hadn’t inherited his father’s genes in that particular area after all. He and his father had never spent enough time together to talk about such trivia. Money, yes. There was always time to talk about money. And if he could have talked politics or pretended an interest in Test Match scores, they might have been closer. Instead he had slipped, or been dropped, whatever the correct word was, into the role of mother’s little companion. He had at first accepted her loneliness and frustration as a normal state, with no idea that things should or could have been different. Only when he grew old enough to play at other boys’ houses, did he meet mothers who smiled a lot and even played games in the garden. At around the same time he began to dislike bed time conversations where she lamented her husband’s shortcomings, hugs that were too close and lasted too long so that he came away smelling of her scent, and praise lavished too publicly on his intelligence and successes at school.
