women concerned), which I’d been too shocked to believe until I had seen the way they’d behaved in all other matters when they had grown up.
‘The way to tell us apart, Theo,’ said Jonah, ‘is that Fred is the one with the red nose and without the sun tan.’
‘Yes, I was going to comment on that, Jonah. Where was it this time?’
‘Tucson, Arizona. A cosmetics conference.’
‘Good?’
‘There were some interesting possibilities floating around.’ Jonah noticed Theo’s smile. ‘Now that everybody’s teeth are so good we’ve got to think of other things to do with them.’
Theo bent over and sniffed the vapour floating up from Jonah’s mug. ‘Among them seems to have been the idea of toothpaste in the form of a hot drink,’ he said.
‘It’s peppermint tea,’ Jonah replied. ‘I don’t like starting the day with an unnatural stimulant.’ Then he turned to me and his virtuous expression melted into a sort of sad smile. God, were they all going to smile like that at me this weekend? ‘Jane, Jane,’ he said, and hugged me in a gesture whose warmth was hampered slightly by having to balance the herbal tea in his mug at the same time. ‘If there’s anything I can do, just ask. That,’ he continued, pointing down at the activity on the grass in front of us, ‘that is a very positive step. It’s a very good thing for you to have done that for all of us, for the family. I’m sure it’s therapeutic as well.’
‘Oh, yes, Jonah,’ I responded, ‘it was very relaxing in my time of need to consult with Alan and Claud and Theo and then redo everything and then go over it in sign language with Jim. I wish we’d stuck with my original plan.’
‘Any carbuncle will be better than having to relive the sort of night I spent in my room last night with Meredith and the kids, who didn’t sleep for more than three minutes at a stretch for the entire night. And Fred plus the bits of his famille that aren’t at boarding school were next door. As far as I can tell, the only couples to get a room to themselves were Alan and Martha and your son and his bit of fluff.’
This last was aimed at me.
‘Alan insisted that Jerome and Hana have a room to themselves,’ I protested. ‘I think it gave him some sort of vicarious, predatory pleasure. I don’t even know where my younger son ended up.’
‘Or who with,’ added Jonah. ‘And far be it from me to breach the inviolable tradition which gives you Natalie’s room to yourself. It sounds like a bedroom farce.’
I followed Jonah and Theo back into the kitchen but I didn’t feel like food, or like joining what was now almost a throng of people fighting for access to the fridge or the stove. I could see no sign of either of my sons. Alan and Martha would exercise the privilege of the hosts and be down late, but almost everybody else seemed to be around. Claud, looking rumpled and pathetic after his night on the sofa, was stirring a large pan of eggs over the gas. Breakfast is the one meal of the day I’ve never been much interested in cooking, but since it is as much an organisational as a culinary matter, Claud has always excelled at it. He nodded amiably at me as he spooned the eggs out onto a large dish for Fred.
It was exactly a year since I had last seen the four brothers together in the same room. Here in their holiday clothes, their old jeans and sweaters or lumberjack shirts, they looked like students again, or even schoolboys, joshing each other and laughing. All except Claud who never quite got it right in casual clothes. He needed a uniform and strict rules. The twins, with their dark complexions and high cheekbones, would have looked more dissolutely sexy after an uncomfortable night on a couch. Claud needed eight hours’ sleep and a well-cut suit to look his best, but his best was very good.
I stole a banana from the fruit bowl and escaped outside again with my coffee. The mist was dispersing in the hollows. The sky was blue now and it was barely eight o’clock. It was going to be a bright day, though very cold, and my overalls weren’t quite warm enough.
I suppose that most of us have a landscape of the mind, the one that we see when we close our