‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?’
‘Why did you murder her?’ said Julia, almost asleep.
‘I didn’t murder her. Not physically.’
In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.