mother’s side, living in retirement in Devon and Suffolk respectively, with whom we exchange Christmas cards, and that’s about it. My own children visit their grandfather very occasionally, but they both live at some distance from London and have busy lives of their own. And he has almost no friends. Those he had in the music business are either dead, or he has lost touch with them; and he never had what one would call a social life. Work was his social life, as I knew from the rare glimpses I had of him doing it: swapping jokes on the stand between sets, chatting to customers in a nightclub, always laughing, smiling, shaking hands, because that’s what’s expected of a dance musician, as he explained to me once. ‘The punters are out to enjoy themselves and they like you to look as if you’re enjoying yourself too, even if you’re feeling miserable.’ So in the hours when he wasn’t working he didn’t want any social life, he just wanted to play golf or fish or pursue one of his other hobbies. He was at work in the hours when ordinary folk were enjoying their leisure, and if he happened to be at home in the evening it was because he hadn’t got a gig or a regular job, so he wouldn’t be in the mood for spending money on going out. Even on Sundays he was often playing at a Jewish wedding or bar mitzvah. The main victim of this lifestyle was my mother, who had little social life, and an unglamorous working life for about twenty-five years as an underpaid clerk in the office of a local builder’s merchant. She had some friends in the street, but since she died most of them have died too, or moved away, and Dad is only on nodding terms with most of his neighbours, apart from the Barkers in the adjoining semi - a railway clerk, now retired, and his wife, who have been there for some thirty years, and whom he trusts without liking. Occupying the house on the other side of the alley fence is a Sikh family with whom he has a relationship that is politely distant on both sides. In effect, he is all alone in Lime Avenue, and I am probably the only person who crosses the threshold of the house these days apart from the doctor and the man who reads the electricity meter. It’s a lonely and vulnerable existence. What’s to be done? I discussed this with Fred when I got back home the night before last.
It was just after ten-thirty when my taxi turned into the gravel drive of 9 Rectory Road. As I let myself in at the front door I was, as always on returning from these excursions, struck by the contrast between the meanly proportioned, dark and dingy semi from which I had come, and the tactfully modernised and beautifully maintained Regency house which is now my home, with its gleaming paint-work and stripped wooden floors, its high ceilings and elegantly curving staircase, its magnolia walls hung with vivid contemporary paintings and prints, its comfortable, discreetly modern furniture, deep pile carpets, and state-of-the-art curtains which move back and forth at the touch of a button. The air was warm, but smelled sweet.
Fred acquired ownership of the house as part of her divorce settlement, and made its improvement her chief hobby until, with the opening of Décor, it became an extension of work, a laboratory for new ideas and an advertisement to potential customers. When we married I was glad to sell the serviceable but rather boring modern four-bedroomed detached box in which Maisie and I brought up our children, and to move into Fred’s house, the money I acquired in this way funding her ambitious improvements. Its three floors provided enough bedrooms for our combined children, two of mine, who were in any case at or about to go to university by then, and three of hers. Nowadays the house is extravagantly large for just the two of us, but Fred likes to throw big parties, and to host inclusive family gatherings at Christmas and similar occasions. Besides, she insists, living space is her luxury: some people like fast cars, or yachts, or second homes in the Dordogne, but she prefers to spend her money on space she can enjoy every day.
I hung up my coat in the hall, and called out ‘Fred!’ to announce my return, and found her, as