He had commandeered the Wolsey again and had steeled himself to call in on his mother on the way to Bill’s. He knew he had to do it like this: a quick visit with a limited time frame, otherwise he’d find himself sucked into Esher Time, an endless Sunday afternoon with no hope of redemption. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his mother, he told himself defensively as he passed the Brighton gates, it was just that, however much she complained that he didn’t visit enough, she never seemed to get much pleasure from his actual presence. Even Jonathan, always her favourite child, had been the cause of endless worry – his sickness, his sore throats, his woeful lack of road-sense. When she got the telegram about Jonathan, she had looked up at Edgar and Lucy and said, ‘I always knew this would happen.’ Had she really always thought all through Jonathan’s childhood that her youngest child would end his days as part of a doomed expeditionary force, be shot and killed, his body lost under the sea?
