On Father’s Day my millionaire son walked into my freezing apartment, saw the tinned soup on the table, and asked how I was managing on the eight thousand a month his wife sends me. I told him nobody sends me anything.

Nobody there has ever asked me what I did for a living. I have never told them.

There are about twenty of us most mornings.

I know four of them by name. One of them taught secondary school mathematics for thirty-one years and we have had four conversations about percentages that I have enjoyed more than most dinners.

Nobody there asks anybody anything. That is the arrangement and it is a good one.

Whenever Emmett rang — and he rang every Sunday, without fail, for three years, which I want on the record before anybody starts on him —

he told me about the family trust.

He said: Thea manages it. It’s all set up.

And then: you shouldn’t have to think about any of it, Dad.

Which is a lovely thing for a son to say to his father, and which is also, as I now understand, an instruction that I followed to the letter for three years.