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Live sound recording, original tape says the caption, and then he’s in the room, reporting through hiss and static, my father still.

And it’s no small thing, you see, the way a child sees a parent. The world comes in through our mothers and our fathers like light through a stained-glass window, and our infant selves can’t help but be coloured by it, then and for ever. To me, Dr Stanley Quinn was always a man dismantled, and Alexandra Quinn – well, she was always a woman fading away.

As a child, it never occurred to me as strange that my mother spent all of her days in bed. Not until years later. At the time, I simply assumed that it was how things should be and, to tell you the truth, I liked it. The mornings and evenings of my very early life would be spent upstairs with her in our home in the country, talking and listening to her read from one of the many books that filled every corner of our house.

My mother was a beautiful woman, pale and delicate, with the kind of hair that lights up like a halo in the sun. Even as an adult, I’ve never been able to equate the knowledge of what was happening to her, that her illness was growing ever more severe, with how I remember the changes she underwent. She simply became softer, paler, lighter. More other somehow, more somewhere else. As far as I can remember, there were no bad days, no coughing fits, no unpleasant deterioration, simply the impression of her becoming less of one thing, and more of another. She spoke quietly, and read to me every day in that gentle voice; we soon exhausted all the children’s books we had in the house, and moved on to the heaped shelves of my parents’ collection. Before long, I was a child of Greek tragedies, Darwinian struggles and of bright, burning tygers. She read aloud the words of great thinkers, writers and artists from all across history and, as she did, she read them into me.