‘Did he want you to continue where he left off?’ ‘He wasn’t capable of imagining anything else for us. It was all that mattered to him. He believed it was our duty.’ ‘When did he die?’ ‘Nine years this winter.’ ‘So he knew you’d transgressed.’ ‘He knew I was reading ethnography with Haddon.’ ‘He thought it was a soft science?’ ‘It wasn’t science at all. Not to him.’ I could hear my father clearly. Pure nonsense. ‘And your mother is of the same persuasion?’ ‘Stalin to his Lenin. I am nearly thirty but entirely in her thrall. My father left it that she hold the purse strings.’
