It was the drugs that were the problem.

Over the years, the doctors had tried electroshock treatment, but, if anything, that had made things worse, so Sophie’s only option was to take a daily cocktail of brightly colored pills. Some of them were antipsychotic and others antidepressant, but they were all referred to as “mood stabilizers.” Whereas together they could usually prevent and treat Sophie’s symptoms, they all had side effects of one sort or another. Not only did they make her feel nauseous, they also tended to reduce the activity of her thyroid gland while increasing her craving for carbohydrates. Hence, Sophie was right, they were inclined to make her fat, and that, in turn, was bad for her state of mind, especially for her depression.

But the most problematic thing about her condition was that when the drugs made her feel free of any form of psychosis, she started to believe, wrongly, that she didn’t need them anymore. The pills, and their side effects, were then thought of as the problem rather than the solution, and hence she stopped taking them, I think more by neglect than design, and then the whole wretched cycle started once more.

For some sufferers, they miss the manic “highs,” and so they purposely stop taking their medication. The high time for some can be very creative. There is a prevalent theory that Vincent van Gogh was a manic-depressive and that during his manias he produced some of the greatest art that man has ever seen while during his depressions he first cut off his own ear and then ultimately shot himself to death.

Many great writers and artists of the past have been referred to as “troubled souls” long before their condition was seen as being mental illness. Manic depression may have given the world more than it realizes. Nowadays, it has been relabeled as “bipolar disorder,” and appears to be almost fashionable amongst the young literati.

“Would you like some fruit salad and ice cream?” said one of the staff, taking our main-course plates.

“Yes, please,” I said. “How about you, my love?”

“Yes,” she replied rather quietly. “Lovely.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, but her eyes were distant.

The doctors were right, I thought. She might need at least another two weeks of their care to get the drug doses sorted out properly.

We finished our lunch and went up to her room. She regularly took a nap in the afternoons, and I was hopeful that it had just been tiredness that had caused her to be somewhat vacant downstairs and not the start of another inward-looking depressive episode.

The two of us sat down in armchairs in front of an old black-and-white war film on the television. Sophie drifted off to sleep while I read her newspaper, mostly the racing pages. Regular domesticity.

The inquest into the death of my father was opened and then adjourned on Monday morning at the Coroner’s Court in Maidenhead.

The proceedings took precisely fourteen minutes.

Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn was called first, and he informed the coroner that a violent assault had occurred in the parking lot at Ascot racetrack on the sixteenth of June, the previous Tuesday, during the evening at approximately eighteen-twenty hours, which had resulted in the subsequent death of a man at Wexham Park Hospital, Slough. The time of death had been recorded as nineteen-thirty hours on the same day.

A written report from the post-mortem pathologist was read out, stating that the primary cause of death was hypoxemic hypoxia, a lack of adequate oxygen supply to the organs of the body. The hypoxia had been brought on by pooling of blood in the lungs as a result of punctures to each side of the deceased’s abdomen caused by a sharply pointed, bladed instrument approximately twelve centimeters, or five inches, in length and a little more than two centimeters in width. The blade had been angled upwards during each strike and had, on both occasions, penetrated the diaphragm and ruptured a lung. The hypoxia had further resulted in acidosis of the blood plasma, which in turn had led to cardiac arrest, cerebral ischemia and, ultimately, death.

Or, in laymen’s terms, my father had died from being stabbed twice in his stomach with a knife. The wounds had caused his lungs to be full of blood rather than air, so he had suffocated to death.

My father had, in fact, died due to a lack of oxygenated blood to his brain.

Just as my mother had. But for different reasons.

I was called by the coroner to give evidence of identification. The letter of summons had indeed been in the pile of mail I had opened on Saturday evening. Amongst other things, it spelt out the dire consequences of my failure to attend the court proceedings.

I was asked by the court usher to state my full name and address, and then to hold a Bible in my right hand. I read the Coroner’s Court oath from a card. “I swear by Almighty God, that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth and nothing but the truth.”

“You are the deceased’s son?” asked the coroner. He was a small, balding man, the meager amount of hair that he did retain being combed right over the top of his head. Throughout the proceedings, he had been writing copious notes in a spiral-bound notebook, and he now looked expectantly at me over a pair of half-moon glasses.

“Yes,” I said. I was standing in the witness-box of the court.

“What was your father’s full name?” he asked.

“Peter James Talbot,” I said.

“And his date of birth?”

I gave it. I knew every detail of my father’s birth certificate as well as I knew my own. The coroner wrote it down in his notebook.

“And his last permanent address?” he asked, not looking up.

I pulled the photocopy of the driver’s license from my pocket and consulted it. “He lived at 312 Macpherson Street, Carlton North, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia,” I said.

“And when did you last see your father alive?” he asked.

“As he was lifted into the ambulance at Ascot racetrack,” I said.

He wrote furiously in his notebook.

“So you were present at the time of the assault?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He wrote it down.

“Was that when your eye was injured?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said again.

The coroner seemed to glance over at Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, who was sitting on a bench to his right.

“Are the police aware of your presence at the time of the assault?” the coroner asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded, as if he had done his bit for the investigation, and wrote something down in his notebook.

“Did you observe the body of the deceased after death at Wexham Park Hospital?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said once more.

“Can you swear to the court-and I remind you, Mr. Talbot, that you are under oath-that the body you observed at that time was that of your father?”

“I believe it was my father, yes,” I said.

The coroner stopped writing his notes and looked up at me.

“That doesn’t sound very convincing, Mr. Talbot,” he said.

“Until the day of his death,” I said, “I hadn’t seen my father, or even known of his existence, for the past thirty-six years.”

The coroner put down his pen.

“And how old are you, Mr. Talbot?” he asked.

“Thirty-seven,” I said.

“Then how can you believe that the deceased was your father if you haven’t seen him since you were one year old?”

“He told me so,” I said.

The coroner appeared amazed.

“And you took his word for it?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I replied, “I did. We had been speaking about family matters for some time before the attack on us in the Ascot parking lot, and I became convinced that, indeed, he was my father as he had claimed. In addition, I was informed by the police last Thursday that DNA analysis had confirmed the fact.”