I take my mother in as she makes the three of us some tea. She was once very pretty. I remember her as having been very pretty when I was a boy.

'Mum,' I sigh, 'how are you, really? I mean, how has the settling-in been? I bet leaving the old place was a wrench.'

'It was, love, it was. And sad, in a way. Davey was here for Christmas of course and kept going to stand at the front gate, or getting into the car, you know, waiting to be taken back to the old house. He was very confused by it all, was our Davey.'

The house of which she speaks, I know, was for her a delivery from the misery of her early marriage. My brother David has Down's Syndrome. And so, yes, he might stand at the gate, any gate, and wait to be driven, or walked, back to the sombre rooms of a former, familiar existence, to the amber wallpapers of childhood's calm.

*