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whenever I sip little kisses between your shoulder-blades. You have the most beautiful back in Kensington and Chelsea combined. Yes, you have, my lolly-Dolly.’

    ‘Oh, you’re the same wicked old billy-goat, Augustus.’

    She sounded pleased, then became reminiscent, and Patrick sank into the depth of her maternal instincts, which in a bachelor girl of forty-nine were predictably safe below the surface.

    On his next visit, however, Patrick found his father full of concern, which frightened him a little. He preferred being laughed at, hearing a yawn or two, and getting those casual single pats when he didn’t expect any.

    ‘Patrick, you’re going to live with your Dolly-mum.’ This both delighted and puzzled him.

    ‘Staying the night? He thought of the house next door. Would the dog sleep or bark? He had never seen a sleeping poodle, and was curious.

    ‘Yes, sleeping and eating, Patrick, it will be the same as at your aunt. . . .’
    Augustus forgot which aunt Patrick had been staying with until now. The boy certainly had too many of them. Some were real, others he called aunt by analogy. Whoever put him to bed and got him out of it for breakfast performed an aunt’s functions. His two mothers were far too important to look after him in an ordinary way. Dolly-mum made sense with her blue teapot or on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The first mummy was even more special: she never poured tea, sat in a bus or trotted in the park; she had a warm voice, and floated on it somewhere in the world from Durham to Liverpool and round the circle. Perhaps Leeds was in Australia because the other day they told him about her tour in Australia.

    Patrick couldn’t really grasp the new arrangement with Dolly-mum. He would never call her auntie. His thoughts were chasing picture after picture. The poodle would be barking its fuzzy head off when he saw him in the window at breakfast.

    Then his father told him about the school. It was called St. Patrick. The word
    ‘Saint’ didn’t sound like anything he knew, but he approved of the idea that a boy could go to a school bearing his own name.

    There must be as many schools as names, he thought, many more than those letters in the alphabet.

    St. Patrick’s School put Patrick through the alphabet again. On good days he could read newspaper headlines in a loud voice behind people’s backs, on others, he whined and stammered over a nursery rhyme, or the Lord’s Prayer, until he was asked to leave the letters in peace. All his teachers walked about in white robes which amused him for a time, but he couldn’t get used to calling them all father without any discrimination about their age and height. He believed in only one father, he said, and they praised him for his piety. Finally, he found a way out: whenever he spoke to anyone of them he called him either yes-father or no-father, and this seemed to work well. They were now telling him that besides being pious he was also a polite boy. If Patrick had any sins left over from the interminable alphabet of the other school, the yes-and-no-fathers saw to it that he received a general cleansing. It came about like this: Patrick mentioned his two mothers, a small, kind laughter followed; Patrick went on about his first mother being a Bulgarian on tour, and one of the older yes-fathers suddenly became very itchy. He scratched the bald circle on his head, summoned a couple of no-fathers with whom he talked and nodded, walking up and down the quad; then all three returned and surrounded Patrick with probabilities.

    ‘We think there’s a probability you weren’t baptized at all. On the other hand, you may be a Greek-Orthodox, that’s quite possible, too. But your aunt was rather vague about your baptism.’ They meant Dolly-mum, but Patrick let them get away with this slip. He didn’t like being Greek and that other thing as well, whatever it was. The old yes-father said he would ring up Patrick’s only father to clarify the