Pulse

for more than just their professional competency. Nowadays, my father says, people do their own conveyancing, write their own wills, agree the terms of their divorce beforehand, and take their own advice. If they want a second opinion, they prefer an agony aunt to a solicitor, and the internet to both. My father takes this all philosophically, even when people imagine they’re capable of pleading their own cases. He just smiles, and repeats the old legal saying: the man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
    Dad advised me against following him into the law, so I did a BEd and now teach in a sixth-form college about fifteen miles away. But I didn’t see any reason to leave the town where I grew up. I go to the local gym, and on Fridays run with a group led by my friend Jake; that’s how I met Janice. She was always going to stand out in a place like this, because she has that London edge to her. I think she hoped I’d want to move to the big city, and was disappointed when I didn’t. No, I don’t think that; I know it.
    Mum … who can describe their mother? It’s like when interviewers ask one of the royals what it’s like to be royal, and they laugh and say they don’t know what it’s like not to be royal. I don’t know what it would be like for my mumnot to be my mum. Because if she wasn’t, then I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, be me, could I?
    Apparently I had a difficult birth. Perhaps that’s why there’s only me; though I’ve never asked. We don’t do gynaecology in our family. Or religion, because we don’t have any. We do politics a bit, but rarely argue, since we think the parties are as bad as one another. Dad may be a bit more right wing than Mum, but essentially we believe in self-reliance, helping others, and not expecting the state to look after us from cradle to grave. We pay our taxes and our pension contributions and have life assurance; we use the National Health Service and give to charity when we can. We’re ordinary, sensible middle-class people.
    And without Mum we wouldn’t be any of it. Dad had a bit of a drink problem when I was little, but Mum sorted him out and turned him into a purely social drinker. I was classified as ‘disruptive’ at school, but Mum sorted me out with patience and love, while making it clear exactly which lines I couldn’t cross. I expect she did the same with Dad. She organises us. She still has a bit of her Lancashire accent left, but we don’t do that silly north–south stuff in our family, not even as a joke. I also think it’s different when there’s only one child, because there aren’t two natural teams, kids and adults. There are just the three of you, and though I might have been more coddled, I also learnt from an earlier age to live in an adult world, because that’s the only game in town. I may be wrong about this. If you asked Janice if she thought I was fully grown up, I can imagine the answer.
    So my mother pulls a face and my father frowns. They walk on until the contents of the concrete bin become clearer: a curving slope of purply-red muck. My mother – and I am guessing here, though her vocabulary is familiar to me – now says something like,
    ‘Pretty whiffy.’
    My father can see what my mother’s referring to: a pile of marc. That’s the name, apparently, for what’s left after grapes have been crushed – the discarded skins and stalks and pips and so on. My parents know about this sort of thing; in their non-fanatical way they are keen on their food and drink. That’s why they were on this farm track in the first place – looking for a few bottles of that year’s wine to take home. I’m not indifferent to food and drink, just regard them more pragmatically. I know which foods are healthiest and also most energy-providing. And I know precisely how much alcohol relaxes me and gives me a good time, and how much is too much. Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: ‘One’s perfect. Two’s too many. And three’s not enough.’ Except in my case: I once ordered a martini – and half was just about right.
    So my father approaches this great heap of detritus, stops about ten feet away and consciously sniffs. Nothing. Five feet – still nothing. Only when he puts his nose almost into the marc does anything register. Even so, it’s just a faint version of the pungent smell his eyes – and his wife – tell him exists. My father’s