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very softly into the kitchen. Should she hand over her stewardship of Heather, half-hearted though it had been, to Edmund? It’s early days, she told herself, but she couldn’t get back to sleep.

CHAPTER 3
    Unless you are very young, it is difficult to have sex if you haven’t a home of your own or the money to provide a temporary refuge. Edmund had had no sex for five years now. The last time had been with an agency nurse at the hospice Christmas party in a room full of washbasins known as the ‘sluice’. And that had been a one-off. Since going out with Heather he had looked back on his largely sex-free twenties with shame and incredulity. Those were the best years of a man’s life as far as desire and potency were concerned, and he had let them pass by because he balked at telling his mother he was bringing back a girl for the night. Regret was pointless. It wasn’t too late and he intended, this evening, to tell his mother he would be going away for the weekend – and why.
    For some time now he had been standing up to her. Long before he met Heather he went home for a meal with his friend, the hospice palliative care doctor, Ian Dell, and saw Ian with his own mother. He had never imagined that his strong-minded decisive friend could be so enfeebled and conciliatory, and under the rule of a parent, as Ian was. Mrs Dell was a little old crone (as Edmund put it unkindly to himself) quite unlike Irene Litton, but their dictatorial manner was similar. It seemed to him that Ian yielded in almost everything to Mrs Dell, even apologising to Edmund afterwards for having refused – very gently – to take a day off fromthe hospice next day to drive her to see her sister in Rickmansworth.
    â€˜I expect you think I should have taken her,’ he said. ‘I do have time off owing to me and we aren’t that busy at the moment, are we? But I suppose I felt, rather selfishly, that it might be the thin end of the wedge. I’ll make it up to her. I’ll take her for a day out somewhere at the weekend.’
    In Ian Edmund had seen himself mirrored. He must change. If he failed to take a stand now when he was only a little over thirty, it would be too late. Although he and Heather had never discussed his mother, somehow it was Heather’s presence in his life that helped him. Gave him confidence and cheered his heart. So when Irene told him – told, not asked him – to come with her to his aunt and uncle in Ealing on the first free Saturday he’d had for a month, he took a deep breath and said no, he’d be busy. The ensuing argument became acrimonious and culminated in his mother having a panic attack. But it is the first step that counts, as Edmund kept telling himself, and after that things gradually got easier. He would be able to tell her about the planned weekend and its purpose and, he thought, screwing up his nerve, she would just have to get on with it.
    When he first asked Heather out for a drink with him he had hardly thought of their relationship as coming to much. A few weeks, he gave it, and no sex because there never was. Besides, Heather hadn’t really had much attraction for him. She was a better prospect than white-faced, skinny, crimson-haired Marion, but almost anyone would have been. Now, though, they had been out for drinks, three meals, two cinemas, one theatre and to a food-through-the-ages exhibition she had been keen on, and he looked at her with new eyes.
    One evening she said to him, ‘I’m a silent person. I talk to my sister but not much to others. I can talk to you.’
    He was enormously touched. ‘I’m glad.’
    â€˜It’s easy with you because you don’t say stupid things. It’s nice.’
    He saw her home to Clapham. When he didn’t leave her at Embankment but came the whole way, she said, ‘You’re so kind to me. I don’t much like walking home from the station on my