I came home eleven months early without telling anyone and found my wife sitting against a wall with her head shaved and her face bruised, while my mother shouted at me to throw her out. I didn't argue. I looked at what had actually been broken in that room, and then I asked my wife for the notebook.

So she managed it. That is the word she uses and I have stopped arguing with it.

For four years she managed my mother's house so that I would not have to.

The first envelope came in the March, seven months before I got home.

It was a letter from a lender about an account in my name that was ninety days down.

Tova opened it because it was addressed to Captain M. Solheim at that house and because she opens my post, which she has done for six years with my say-so.

She took it to my mother. My mother said it was a mistake and that she would sort it.

Two weeks later there was a second one from a different lender.

And on the last Saturday in March there was a church supper at St Brannoc's in Kellow. Thirty people. My mother's sister organises it every year.