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had the word 'bombshell' seemed more apt. I felt like a house shaken by some nearby explosion: tiles had fallen, there was a thick cloud of dust, windows had blown in. The house was still standing but it was fragile now, crazy, the structure askew and less solid. I had thought, almost wanting to believe, that this was the beginning of some complex type of delusion or dementia in her – but I realised that, for my part, this was a form of perverse wishful thinking. The other side of my brain was saying: No: face it, everything you thought you knew about your mother was a cleverly constructed fantasy. I felt suddenly alone, in the dark, lost: what does one do in a situation like this?
    I tracked over what I knew of my mother's history. She had been born in Bristol, so the story went, where her father was a timber merchant, a timber merchant who had gone to work in Japan in the 1920s, where she had been schooled by a governess. And then back to England, working as a secretary before her parents' deaths prior to the war. I remembered talk of a much-loved brother, Alisdair, who had been killed at Tobruk in 1942… Then marriage to my father, Sean Gilmartin, during the war, in Dublin. In the late 1940s they moved back to England and they settled in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where Sean was soon established in a successful practice as a solicitor. Birth of daughter Ruth occurred in 1949. So much, so relatively ordinary and middle-class – only the Japanese years adding a touch of the otherworldly and exotic. I could even remember an old photo of Alisdair, uncle Alisdair, propped on a table in the living room for a while. And talk too from time to time of émigré cousins and relatives in South Africa and New Zealand. We never saw them; they sent the odd Xmas card. The swarming Gilmartins (my father had two brothers and two sisters – there were a dozen cousins) gave us more than enough family to cope with. Absolutely nothing to take exception to; a family history like hundreds of others, only the war and its consequences being the great schism in lives of otherwise utter normality. Sally Gilmartin was as solid as this gatepost, I thought, resting my hand on its warm sandstone, realising at the same time how little we actually, really, know of our parents' biographies, how vague and undefined they are, like saints' lives almost – all legend and anecdote – unless we take the trouble to dig deeper. And now this new story, changing everything. I felt a kind of sickness in my throat about the unknown revelations that I was sure would have to come – as if what I knew now were not destabilising and disturbing enough. Something about my mother's tone informed me that she was going to tell me everything, every little personal detail, every hidden intimacy. Perhaps because I had never known Eva Delectorskaya, Eva Delectorskaya was now determined that I should learn absolutely everything about her.
    Other mothers were now gathering, I saw. I leant back against the gatepost and rubbed my shoulders against it. Eva Delectorskaya, my mother… What was I to believe?
    'Fiver for them,' Veronica Briggstock whispered in my ear and brought me out of my reverie. I turned and kissed her, for some reason – we normally never embraced as we saw each other almost every day. Veronica – never Vron, never Nic – was a nurse at the John Radcliffe Hospital, divorced from her husband, Ian, a lab technician in the university chemistry department. She had a daughter Avril, who was Jochen's best friend.
    We stood together, talking about our respective days. I told her about Bérangère and her amazing coat as we waited for our children to emerge from the school. The single mothers at Grindle's seemed unconsciously – or consciously, perhaps – to gravitate towards each other, being perfectly friendly towards the divorced mothers and the still-married mothers, of course, and the occasional sheepish dad, but somehow preferring their own company. They could