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moteur’ . This was partly to make myself uncheerful, and partly a protest against the Front Seat’s refusal to use the Motorola. It had come with the car and was, in my view, the chief selling point of this non-foreign, non-streamlined, non-red, non-sports car. There was even a sticker in the back window, which had resisted various applications of soapy water, advertising the Motorola: it read I’VE BEEN EXPOSED TO RADIO ACTIVITY . We weren’t allowed to use it on the road, because, the Front Seat maintained, it would be distracting to the driver (and we weren’t allowed to use it in the garage because that ran down the battery).
    Twenty minutes of safe driving brought us to Uncle Arthur’s bungalow near Chesham. He was a humorous old fugger – cunning, stingy, and usually lying. He lied in a way Ialways found engaging: not for profit, or even for effect, but simply because it gave him a thrill. Toni and I had once done a pilot study of lying, and after a thorough examination of everyone we knew had plotted a Mendacity Curve on a piece of graph paper. It looked like the horizontal cross-section of a pair of tits, with the nipples at ages sixteen and sixty. Arthur and I were probably peaking at just about the same time.
    ‘Hullo all,’ he shouted as we turned into the drive. He was white-haired, stooped more than he needed to because it gained him unearned sympathy, and dressed with an aggressive scruffiness designed to make you feel sorry for his bachelor life. My theory was that he’d only remained unmarried because there was no one rich enough to keep him who was also stupid enough not to see through him. ‘Did you make good time?’
    ‘Not too bad, Arthur,’ replied my father, winding up his window. ‘Bit of a hold-up at Four Roads, but I suppose you’ve got to expect that.’
    ‘Yes, bloody Sunday motorists. Oops, excuse my French.’ Arthur had just pretended to spot me getting out of the car. ‘And how are you, lad? Brought some reading I see.’ It was a small pocket edition of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues .
    ‘Yes, Uncle, I knew you wouldn’t mind.’ (With a half-glance at my mother)
    ‘Of course not, ’course not. Need a bit of help, first, though.’
    Uh-huh.
    Melodramatically, Arthur straightened up his back with his thickened fingers, then kneaded away at the cable-stitches of his cardigan as if they were strings of seized-up muscles.
    ‘Been having a bit of trouble with a stump out back. Come and have a look. Why don’t the rest of you go in?’ (Nigel was always spared chores like this because of an obscure chest complaint; Mary on the grounds of being a girl; my parents on the grounds of being parents.)
    Still, I had to admire the old sod. If his back was playing up, it must have been because some chair-cushions had turned nasty on it. He knew better than to go digging up stumps so soon after Sunday lunch. Half an hour with the show page ofthe Sunday Express was about all the exercise he’d have taken. But it was all part of an elaborate revenge Arthur had been taking on me for years. During my age of innocence, he’d met us one Sunday with some tale about shagging himself out in the garden. While he was boring on to my father about brassica, I’d whipped into the lounge and given his chair a quiet feel. Hot as goose-shit, just as I’d thought. When the others came in I’d casually remarked,
    ‘Uncle, you can’t have been digging the garden like you said – your chair’s still warm.’
    He’d scanned me with an unforgiving glance, then rushed off with an energy untypical of one who’d just been tangling with cabbage stumps. ‘Ferdinand,’ we’d heard him shouting. ‘Ferdinand. FERDINAND !!’ From the hall, a friendly pad of paws, some slobbery mouth-noises, a solid crump as brogue hit labrador. ‘And never let me catch you in my chair again.’
    Ever afterwards I would find that Arthur had stored up some small but unpleasant task for me, like turning an