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yawning.
     
    I mumbled at him and went to make coffee in the washroom. Bonnie was out in the yard, pottering around. Ganesh had the radio on. I gave him a hand assembling the Sunday supplements into the relevant papers. They seem to get fatter and fatter. You wouldn’t think people had time to read them all. But if you forget to put, say, the motoring supplement in the Sunday Telegraph , the buyer is back within thirty minutes angrily demanding to know why he doesn’t have the complete set. So then you have to pinch one from another made-up copy because there’s never a spare. If he’s short, it probably means you’ve put two motoring supplements in someone else’s set. Get my drift? But when you’ve taken one from another set, that set is incomplete and the whole thing is linked into a sequence of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
     
    So it was a normal day and yet wasn’t normal. It was a day like no other. It was the day I was going to make contact with a woman who’d walked out of my life fourteen years before and whom I’d been confident I’d never see again.
     
    I breakfasted upstairs with Hari and Gan, and when they’d gone down to the shop, rang Clarence Duke.
     
    ‘You’re early,’ he said, sounding a bit miffed. It was just after eight. ‘It’s Sunday.’ That meant I’d got him from his bed for sure.
     
    I told him I’d been up a couple of hours. There’s a particular feeling of virtue which comes from telling someone you’ve been busy while they’ve been dead to the world.
     
    ‘What’s more,’ I said, ‘I rang last night and you’d left your answering machine on. It wasn’t convenient to leave a message. It wasn’t my phone.’
     
    ‘I’ve got a private life, you know,’ he said.
     
    ‘I thought I had one until you turned up,’ I retorted.
     
    I heard him make a noise which sounded like a yawn. ‘Does this mean you’re going to see Eva?’ he asked.
     
    ‘I’m thinking about it,’ I told him, unwilling to commit myself aloud, despite the fact that my mind was made up and Ganesh, even as we spoke, was arranging to borrow his mate Dilip’s car.
     
    He said, ‘Right, glad you’re going.’
     
    That annoyed me. It wasn’t what I’d said. But it was what I’d meant and he’d realised it. He gave me the address and phone number of the hospice. He sounded offhand, which surprised me a little. But perhaps he had another case to follow up and, now he’d concluded this one satisfactorily, he’d lost interest. Or, more likely, he was going back to bed.
     
    As I hung up it occurred to me that he referred to my mother, his client, in a very familiar way. Never Mrs Varady or whatever name she used these days. Always Eva. But it was too late to ask him about that. There were a lot of questions I probably should have asked him and hadn’t. There’s nothing like going into a strange and frightening situation absolutely stone-cold ignorant.
     
     
    The hospice was at Egham. I hadn’t expected it to be out of London. But possibly there is a scrap of consolation in passing your last days in nice leafy Surrey, rather than among the bricks and traffic of a big city.
     
    ‘It’s going to take us half the afternoon to get there and find it,’ I said to Ganesh.
     
    He told me not to worry; even in Dilip’s car we’d do it easily. I decided not to phone ahead first. Simply, I was afraid they’d put my mother on the line and I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for any kind of meeting, but I’m never at my best on the phone, anyway.
     
    We rattled through Egham in Dilip’s beat-up elderly Datsun, rather lowering the tone of the place. They’re very upmarket in Egham.
     
    I didn’t know what to expect of a hospice; something like a hospital, perhaps. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was a large brick house halfway up a hill outside the town, set in a big garden with lots of trees between it and the road. We clanked and bounced down the drive and parked where a