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brother Albert who said he’d come over in the morning.
    ‘But I need you now,’ Vera insisted. ‘Horace has just tried to stab Esmond. He’s out of his mind.’
    Albert kept his thoughts about his brother-in-law’s mental condition to himself and put the phone down. He was over the alcohol limit himself and he had no intention of losing his licence for no better reason than that Horace Wiley had tried to do what any sane father would have done years ago.

Chapter 6
    And so while Horace escaped from the torment of his family life in drunken sleep, his wife spent a sleepless night trying to come to terms with the knowledge that her husband was insane and that he would lose his job at the bank and end his days in a lunatic asylum which all the neighbours would know about. This combination of ghastly outcomes led her thoughts to an even more melodramatic conclusion: that Horace might actually succeed in murdering her darling son as soon as her back was turned. Vera Wiley determined never to leave them alone again, and so strong was her romantic imagination that she gained some comfort from the prospect of defending her darling Esmond even if this meant being stabbed todeath herself by her demented husband in the process. Naturally, Horace would die with her – she would see to that – and Esmond would go through life suitably haunted by unrequited guilt (Vera wasn’t sure what ‘unrequited’ meant except that it had something to do with love and was somehow unavoidable) and the dread secret of the tragedy which he could never bring himself to tell anyone. Vera accompanied these theatrical thoughts with a series of sobs and finally towards dawn dozed fitfully while her husband snored.
    In his bedroom, Esmond listened to these sounds and tried to understand what had happened, and why his father had called him a ‘damned spot’ and told him to get the hell out of the house. It was most peculiar and, to an impressionable youth, deeply disturbing. And his father’s intentions with regard to the use of the carving knife had been too obvious to be ignored.
    Caught between an embarrassingly sentimental mother and a manifestly murderous father, or, at the very least, one who didn’t behave at all rationally, it was not surprising that Esmond felt the need to escape into a healthier and less confusing atmosphere in which he wouldn’t be accepted so uncritically by his mother and rejected so bitterly by his father. There were other worlds to conquer and the sooner he could find one that suited him the better. By the time he finally fell asleep Esmond, in his first act of rebellion since the ill-fated experiment with the drums, hadmade up his mind to run away from home. It was too bad. He shouldn’t have to put up with such treatment and even if he ended up living on the streets, poor and hungry and friendless, it had to be better than this.
    But he was saved this desperate measure by his Uncle Albert who arrived the next morning in his Aston Martin after Esmond had left for school.
    ‘Now what’s all this about?’ he demanded in his usual loud voice as soon as he entered the house. Vera hurried him into the kitchen and shut the door.
    ‘It’s Horace. He came home drunk and started shouting at Esmond and then he grabbed a knife and tried to kill him. He said the most horrible things about me too and how there were two of him and –’
    ‘Two what of him?’ Albert interrupted.
    ‘I don’t know. He wasn’t making any sense. He just said he was always looking at himself and he couldn’t stand it any more.’
    Albert considered this prospect and thought he understood.
    ‘Can’t say I blame him. Dreadful-looking fellow. Comes of being a bank manager. I’ve never known one who wasn’t bloody sour. Can’t think why you married the bloke.’
    ‘Because he loved me passionately. He couldn’t live without me,’ said Vera, who had long since translated this fiction into fact. ‘We got engaged … he proposed to me