I am so deeply engrossed that I almost miss the sound of the back door opening. Someone is in the kitchen, I realise. Quickly, I bundle together all the letters and papers, shove them back into the box and look for somewhere to put them. In the corner of the room is the big chest freezer where my mother kept all her vegetables and herbs, and where Valentina now keeps her boil-in-the-bag dinners. I stick them in there. The door opens.

“Oh, you here still,” says Valentina.

“I’m just doing a bit of tidying up.” My voice is placatory (no point in upsetting her-I will be gone soon, and then she will be left with my father) but she takes this as a slight.

“I too much working. No time house working.”

“Quite.” I lean casually on the freezer.

“You father-he no give me money.”

“But he gives you half his pension.”

“Pension no good. What can buy with pension?”

I don’t want to argue with her. I just want her to go, so I can get on with looking through the papers. But then I realise she may have come back for her boil-in-the-bag lunch.

“Would you like me to make lunch for you, Valentina? You can go upstairs and have a rest, while I get the lunch ready.” She is surprised and mollified, but declines my offer. “I no time eating. Only sandwich” (she pronounces it san-yeedge). “I come get car. After finish working I go Peterborough with Margaritka shopping.”

She bangs the door and drives off in the car, and I am left with a box of frozen documents.

I make a copy of the solicitor’s letter, but then I see that there are only two sheets of copier paper left, so I stop. I slip one of the wedding photos into my handbag, as well as the copies I have made. Then I put the rest of the papers back into the box.

As I am doing so, another paper catches my eye. It is a letter from the Institute of Feminine Beauty in Budapest, typed on thick cream paper, with a gold-embossed border, to a Mrs Valentina Dubova at Hall Street, Peterborough. It thanks her, in English, for her esteemed custom and acknowledges the payment of three thousand US dollars in respect of breast enhancement surgery. It is signed with a flourish by a Doktor Pavel Nagy. From the date, I work out that it must have taken place a few months before their marriage, during her trip to Ukraine. My mind goes back to the fat brown envelope. Three thousand US dollars is a little over £1,800. So my father must have known what it was for. Must have known, and must have been eager to pay it.

“Pappa,” I call him, softly, so as not to reveal the extent of my rage. “Pappa, what is this?”

“Mmm. Yes.” He looks at the letter and nods. There is nothing he can say.

“You are crazy. Lucky you have an appointment with the psychiatrist tomorrow.”

I stow the box of frozen letters under my father’s bed, with strict instructions that he must replace them in the boot of her car at the earliest opportunity, without her seeing. I suppose I should stay and do it myself, but it is already early evening, and I just want to get away, to get home to kind, sane Mike and my orderly house. I cook him macaroni cheese-maggot-white, tasteless, but he can eat it without his false teeth. We eat in silence. There is nothing left to say. When he has finished, I say goodbye. As I turn from the lane into the main road, a car careers wildly round the bend in the other direction. One headlamp is broken. In the front are two grinning figures: Valentina and Margaritka returning from their shopping trip.

My father’s visit to the psychiatrist is a triumph. The consultation lasts a whole hour, and the consultant hardly gets a word in edgeways. He is a most cultured and intelligent type, my father says. An Indian, by the way. He is fascinated by my father’s theory of the relationship between mechanical engineering as applied to tractors and the psychological engineering advocated by Stalin, as applied to the human soul. He is sympathetic to Schopenhauer’s observation of the connection between madness and genius, but reluctant to be drawn into a debate about whether Nietzsche’s supposed madness was an effect of syphilis, though he admits under pressure that there is some merit in my father’s case that Nietzsche’s genius was merely misunderstood by less intelligent types. He asks my father whether he believes that he is being persecuted. “No, no!” my father exclaims. “Only by her!” He points at the door behind which Valentina is lurking. (The doctor wanted to discover whether I am suffering from a paranoia, my father said, but of course I did not fall for this trick.)

Valentina is miffed at being excluded from the consultation, since she believes it was she who first brought my father’s madness to the attention of the authorities. She is even more miffed when my father emerges with a beam of triumph on his face.

“Very intelligent doctor. He says I not crazy. You crazy!” She barges into the psychiatrist’s office and starts to berate him in a variety of languages. The doctor calls the hospital porters and she is asked to leave. She flounces out throwing offensive remarks about Indians over her shoulder.

“OK, Pappa, so the visit to the psychiatrist was a success. But what happened to your head? Where did you get that cut?”

“Ah, this too is Valentina’s doing. After she failed to have me certified as insane, she attempted to murder me.”

He describes another ugly scene as they emerge from the porticoed entrance of the hospital, still shouting at each other. She pushes him, and he loses his footing and falls down the stone steps, banging his head. It starts to bleed.

“Come,” says Valentina, “You foolish falling-on-ground man. Get in car quick quick quick we go home.”

A small crowd has gathered around them.

“No, go away, murderer!” my father cries, flailing his arms about. “I will riot go home with you!” His glasses have fallen off and one of the lenses is smashed.

A nurse steps out of the crowd, and looks at my father’s head wound. It is not deep, but it bleeds copiously. She takes him by the arm.

“Might be just as well to pop into Casualty and have it looked at.”

Valentina grabs his other arm.

“No, no! He my husband. He OK. He coming home in car.”

There is a tug of war between the two women, my father in the middle, all the time protesting ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ The crowd of onlookers has swelled. The nurse calls the hospital security guards and my father is taken to Accident & Emergency, where his wound is dressed, Valentina still stubbornly clinging to his arm. She will not let him go.

But my father refuses to leave A & E with Valentina. “She wants to murder me!” he calls out to anyone who comes within earshot. In the end, a social worker is called, and my father, his head dramatically bandaged, is admitted to a residential hostel for the night. Next day, he is escorted home in a police car.

Valentina is waiting for him when he arrives, all smiles and bosom.

“Come, holubchik, my little pigeon. My darling.” She pats his cheek. “We will not argue any more.”

The policemen are charmed. They accept her offer of tea, and sit around in the kitchen far longer than is necessary, discussing the vulnerability and foolishness of old people, and how important it is that they be properly looked after. The policemen advance instances of elderly people who have been duped by doorstep criminals and knocked over in the street by muggers. Not all old people are so lucky as to have a loving wife to care for them. Valentina expresses horror at these wanton instances of brutality.

And maybe she is genuinely repentant, says my father, for after the policemen have gone she does not turn on him in a fury, but takes his hand and places it on her breast, stroking it with her fingers, chiding him gently for mistrusting her and allowing this shadow to fall between them. She does not even abuse him for taking her box of papers and hiding it under his bed. (Of course she found them-of course my father did not manage to return them to the boot of the car.) Or maybe someone (Mrs Zadchuk?) has explained to her the meaning of the last sentence of the solicitor’s letter.