My mother could make patterns, strings of cut-out dancing dolls, and she did such things with colour. It was her habit to buy second-hand clothes and to dye them in the big jam pan. Often when I got home from school, she would call out ‘I’m dyeing’ from the basement. Her colours were always changing but her favourites were silver and pink, smoky grey and mauve with no red in it. We mixed colours a lot, at the kitchen table. Guessing what the outcome would be if we mixed powder paint or watercolour or oil paint or Smarties or icing or ribbons, this was a good game. She let me paint potato crisps and offer them around when her friends came to drink coffee or — at Christmas, I think — Cinzano Bianco. She scribbled with wax crayons on cartridge paper — very expensive — and let me colour in all the little moons between the waxen boundaries of scribble, and to try never to have a colour adjacent to itself; was that possible? We used her paints from her student days, a Rowney set with little replaceable pans of watercolour, and a Cotman set whose replacements came wrapped in paper like sweets from Aitken Dott the art supplies shop on Hanover Street.

I had some triangular wooden mosaics with which I made patterns, and some wooden sticks named Cuisenaire that my poor parents hoped would make me better at mathematics, and architectural wooden blocks from Germany in a duffel bag. I would ask my mother all the time, ‘Which do you like best?’, ‘Which is your favourite?’ She would make a case for each. I do it with my children. The youngest gets cross. He thinks that I am being politically correct, that I am in thrall to the tediously New Labourite phenomenon he calls ‘the Equal Elves’. I’m afraid I am just copying my mother.

I cannot remember much about my mother, but I shall try, now, to do it. I am looking for her and with her for my ability to look.

I have looked away from it for a long time while pretending to look at it. God knows how it is for people who contemplate the disintegration or physical fission of someone they love. At least she was in one piece in my bed where she, at thirty-six, lay dead.

I regard (a word of seeing, I see) that last sentence as too aggressive to the reader, too showy, to remain. It is bad form. I cannot, I observe, look at it. So I’m going to make an experiment, and leave it.

I will now try to remake my mother’s last day during which she took me to the Nubian goat farm at Cammo to choose a pointer puppy, a dog that must have been a sop to me, or perhaps to herself, like the drugged meat burglars are said to throw for guard dogs. I remember the lop-eared goats and the brindle pups.

When with either of my parents, I had the sense that each was fragile. I asked them that disturbing incessant question, ‘Are you all right?’ a lot. His breathing sounded wrong, they fought too much, she cried on the edge of her bed. I avoided them on account of this, and hung about after school with the boarders, or walked home with other girls, bribing them with the bus fare I would save by walking. I had friends by now, other children of bookish homes, or daughters of my parents’ friends. I wasn’t popular, but I was on the verge of being a cult. Something was happening at home and other girls’ parents talked about it.

By no means all fathers liked finding me at the after-school tea table when they got in from work. There was something provisional and not respectable about me. It wasn’t just that my mother was tall and sexy and wore sometimes a silver and sometimes a pink wig, that she smoked or had that Englishy voice, the Siamese on a lead, the black poodle-cross (named Agip after Italian petrol—‘supercorte maggiore, la potenta benzina Italiana’) or the yellow Labrador Katie. It wasn’t really anything as simple as that I was not named Fiona or Elspeth. I was a Mc, after all, if not a Mac. It wasn’t as though she didn’t hand out jars of home-made, misspelt ‘blackcurrent’ jam, that delicious staining preserve with something of its leaves’ cat’s-pee tang to the black fruit.

It wasn’t Mummy’s awful driving. She learned only late in her life and had a half-timbered Mini van that got into scrapes. She might put the card discs from tubes of Horlicks tablets in the parking meters in Charlotte Square instead of sixpence.

That’s the worst thing, morally, I saw her do.

She was pursued by more than one man who was not within her marriage. One of these, later, after I was the mother of three, came round for lunch with me in my marital home.

‘What happened to your mother?’ he asked.

‘She died,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

As I’ve said, a number of people have wanted to tell me what my mother did in her last days, or on her last day. I have no desire to know. I may be wrong in this. Other people are involved, and I don’t want them hurt. I don’t want anecdotes or gossip. I want the emotional truth, so I can make her better. And that I cannot have. I want the printout of her human heart.

I do not think that we can at this distance know the truth.

I do not think that we could even then have known the truth or seen it.

I have very often wanted to take from her thoughts whatever it was that so hurt her that she felt she had to die, and to replace it with the complete certainty that she is loved, and that by people, my children, their fathers, who never even knew her. I do not know how I know this save that she has grown less fragile, less contingent and less fantastic in my mind, the longer she has been dead. In life she felt frail to me, like a story, unless stories are not frail.

Bridge

My house in Oxford lay, and still lies, last in a Regency cul-de-sac of artisans’ houses behind an almost Georgian street that is at right angles to the comely parade of Beaumont Street that itself holds both the Ashmolean Museum and the Randolph Hotel.

I finished writing the last chapter you read on Ash Wednesday 2007. I am now speaking to you.

Deeper into the year on a hot May day, I very nearly burned my house to ash. Being an old terraced house made of wood and lath, it might as well have been a blue touchpaper.

As had become usual, I couldn’t see that day. I had become used to groping my way up and down the narrow staircase of the house, much as you do on a boat. For reasons to be seen, I have spent a good deal of my life in boats. Nonetheless, I am no good in on at or with them. I had acclimatised myself to the layout of the house but still banged into things and fell over frequently, especially over the piles of books. The things I loved had, though I didn’t know it, become a danger to me, and twice I slid gratingly face first down a flight of stairs over a slither of hardbacks, old TLSs and magazines. I was used to having bloody knees like a schoolboy and bruised hips like a mother with a granite baby. That hot day I was as usual pretending to myself and to the nobody at all who was looking that everything was all right.

I had run dry on doctors. My condition’s intractability either exasperated or baffled them and such significant words as ‘referral’ and ‘Queen Square’ had been muttered. One psychiatrist who vividly reminded me of the Scottish wizard Michael Scott who is mentioned in the Purgatorio, said that I had chosen to close my eyes against the unbearable sight of Fram’s happiness with his new love Claudia; I came back with the old argument — that since I love him I wish him to be happy. There was an air of psychological manipulation in that expensive room that might be better kept for playwrights than appointed healers.

There was the episode of the wonderfully named Alexina Fantato, who turned out to be not a strapping Italian glamourpuss with sexy but stern spectacles but a dear lady from Scotland married to an Italian. There’s a tradition in Scotland for these feminine-ending masculine names, Donalda, Kennethina. It seems that all note of disappointment is unintentional, unlike those long declensions of heir-hungry hermaphroditic names to be found in Burke. Alexina shrewdly saw that I had ‘issues’, as she kindly expressed it, with self-esteem. I made my usual noises about preferring to live by suppression than by spillage. She made a sensibly pawky face of disbelief at how someone this old could so mismanage her life.