Dr Snippet sighed and blew his nose.

'It is the root of all we do here, Mr Stieff. If you'll forgive me for going off on a tangent for a moment.'

It was by no means unusual for Dr Snippet to go off on a tangent. My one-on-one tutorials with him were a special benefit, conferred without warning by the college presumably in recognition of my lacklustre academic attainments. But the man never stuck to the subject at hand. When I'd asked whether his musings were relevant for the exams, he'd tutted and said, 'Mr Stieff, if all you cared about was examination results, you could have gone to ' he coughed, as if about to say a rude word 'Keele. You are here not for a degree but for an education.'

'I mean to say, Mr Stieff,' said Dr Snippet, 'that is how we began. The tutorial. Five hundred years ago, when this college was founded, I would have been a priest and you a young nobleman. We would all have been Catholics then, and the private confession of one's sins would have been familiar to us. Much as aheh-aheh-aheh you come now to confess your sins of incomprehension.

'Psychotherapeutic practice, of course,' he continued, 'draws from quite the same wellspring. The monasteries may have been dissolved, Mr Stieff, but their ways are all around us! Of course, there would have been no women in the colleges then. Still, times change and we change with them.' He blew his nose so loudly that I was unable to decide if I had really heard him say, 'More's the pity.'

When I returned to Annulet House that afternoon, the phone was ringing in the side passage by the kitchen. I ran in to answer it.

'Hello?' I said. 'Hello?' I was breathless and the line was crackly.

'Marco!' called a woman's voice, followed by a babble of Italian.

'Stop, stop,' I said, catching my breath. 'Do you speak English? Inglese?'

There was a pause.

'I wish to speak to Mark. Is he there, please?' said the woman in accented tones.

'Um,' I said. 'He's not in.'

'Who is this, please?'

'It's, um, it's James. A friend of Mark's. I live here too.'

'Ahhhhh, he told me this. Some friends, to keep him company. Bene. Now James, this is Isabella. I am Mark's mother.'

She paused, as if knowing that I would need a moment to gather my thoughts. I thought with horror of the photographs in the study of a woman in diaphanous silk, and of the things Mark had told me about his parents.

Mark's father, Sir Mewan Winters, had ploughed the family money into industry in the 1950s and 1960s, turned his moderate fortune into a vast one and then, in the early 1970s, just after his fiftieth birthday and long a confirmed bachelor with various cousins and nephews eagerly anticipating the inheritance that would one day be theirs made a sudden match with Isabella, an actress who had appeared in a few mildly erotic Italian movies and was almost thirty years his junior. Mark had been their only child, and the marriage hadn't lasted. His mother had been too unstable, his father too distant. Mark was packed off to boarding school at seven, only for Isabella to remove him on a sudden whim at thirteen. According to Mark, she led a rackety life and had dragged him with her through much of it: several husbands, with one not always quite given up when the next was acquired, constant travel and now a great deal of time spent in California with a much younger lover, a weekly colonic irrigation, a personal vegan chef and a psychic counsellor on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

'Oh,' I said, 'er, hello.'

I think I expected she would suddenly start chanting at me.

'James,' she said, in a perfectly sensible voice, 'can you give to Mark a message from me? Tell him I will be in Oxford at the end of next week, yes? You will all like to meet me? You are not too busy?'

'Oh,' I said, trying desperately to stop remembering that I had seen a photograph of her naked breasts, 'yes I'd love to meet you. Er, that is, um, no, we're not too busy.'

She made a curt 'mm' sound, then said, 'I am glad. You will tell Mark that we spoke about this? You will not forget?'

'I won't forget.' I certainly wouldn't.

'You will give him the message as soon as you see him?'

'I'll even leave it for him, in case I'm out.'

She laughed. 'Good! Very responsible young man, James! Make sure he understands, James. At the end of next week. Friday.'

She gave me a number in Paris where she could be reached and hung up.

I stood in the passage holding the note I'd written. I looked around. Where could I put it that Mark would be sure to find it? The kitchen was cluttered with several days' worth of breakfast things. Mark employed a cleaner to come in twice a week to tidy up after us. Was today one of her days? Might she throw away this scrap of paper? An obvious solution came to mind.

Upstairs, I pushed open the door to Mark's bedroom with a jangle of nerves. It felt unexpectedly intimate to be here without his knowledge or permission. The room was large with, at one end, an enormous curved bay window. The bed was huge too a cream-curtained four-poster. Mark's clothes were scattered across the floor, heaped in piles and bundled into black rubbish bags.

Books, mostly theology with titles like Blood of Crucifixion and The Annotated Doctrine of Atonement, were stacked neatly at one side of the little walnut desk, and pages of notes were arranged in a half-circle on the floor around the chair. I picked one up idly and read the essay title 'A God Who Does Not Suffer Cannot Save: Discuss'.

After a few moments I put the essay down, slightly bewildered. I'd known Mark was studying theology, but hadn't thought anyone could take it seriously. I was not religious. My parents were somewhere between agnostic and the woolliest Church of England. They'd married in a church, Anne and I had been baptized, and that had been that. Anne was a positive and committed atheist, asserting that 'the whole thing's rubbish. Not just rubbish. Pernicious rubbish'.

I put the note on his desk. As I stepped back, I noticed the edge of a brown figure hanging on the wall, mostly concealed behind the sweep of the curtains. I walked over to it and gingerly pulled back the edge of the curtain to find, as I'd half-known I would, a dark brown wooden crucifix, the length of my forearm, polished to a burnished gleam. The figure on the cross was emaciated, each rib showing clearly through the skin, a deep hollow between chest and pelvis. The figure's mouth was open in a grimace of agony, the flesh of the hands was ripped and battered around the nails.

It would have been better if it had been openly on display. That way I might have said to myself that it was a piece of art, appreciated for its skill and technique. But this hidden figure was something else. An object for prayer, for belief. A private ritual. I felt revolted by the image, by its implicit praise for suffering and for humiliation and for pain. I wanted to hold up my wretched grinding knee and say, 'This? Is there glory in this?'

After a few dizzy and uncertain moments, I pulled the curtain back and limped from the room.

Mark did not return home until past midnight, by which time I had forgotten about the note. Franny had found a box of hats in the cellar labelled 'Maud, 1936' and was going through it. We particularly liked the fez decorated with two stuffed pheasants lolling uneasily on wires. Our first-year university exams were only a few weeks away now, and we longed for distractions.

'What do you think?' said Franny, sweeping her head from side to side to make the long tail feathers shake. 'Am I fit to be seen at Ascot?'

'Absolutely not,' said Simon, making a grab for the hat. 'You'd frighten the horses.'

Franny laughed and made to grab it back. There was a brief, noisy tussle.

'What's all this?' came a voice from the other side of the door.

It was Mark. I hadn't heard him come in; none of us had. We eyed each other nervously. We were still uncertain how free we could be with the things we found in the house.

Mark pushed open the door. He held up his hand. He was shaking.

'Who ...' he began, but could not continue. He breathed in and out twice, then started again. 'Who left this bloody note for me?'

We looked at each other. For just a second, I felt as bewildered as the rest. I had left a note, but surely he must mean some other note, some more offensive missive?

His voice was almost a whisper. 'Who left this note in my room?'

I cleared my throat.

'Erm. I did? Sorry. I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to go into your room without permission. I just couldn't think of where else to leave it and your mother seemed so insistent that ...'

He stared at me, as if I was an enemy he'd underestimated.

'You? You spoke to my mother?'

The others were staring at me. I couldn't imagine what they thought I'd written to Mark. I began to wonder if I'd had some sort of psychotic break and instead of 'Mark, your mum called, she's coming to visit next week' I'd written 'Mark, your mum called, she's a filthy whore', and smeared it with excrement.

'The phone was ringing,' I said. 'When I got in the phone was ringing so I answered it and ' I looked around 'all it says is that Mark's mum is coming to visit.'

'Oh,' said Jess mechanically. 'That's lovely news, isn't it, Mark?'

'Ahm,' said Mark, and dropped the hand holding the note to his side. A few drops of blood rolled stickily down his hand and splashed on to the pale green carpet. They made perfect round circles. Mark looked down at his hand and then at all of us. His eyes were afraid, dumb and desperate.

'Oh!' said Emmanuella. 'Mark, you have hurt yourself!'

Mark did nothing. He stood in place and the blood rolled down his arm, dripping on to the carpet.

It was Jess, at last, who stood up and took him by the hand to the bathroom. It was Jess who cleaned his arm and dressed his wounds, not commenting on the five perfectly regular lateral scores across the inside of his upper arm. It was Jess who, afterwards, when he was quiet and peaceful, pulled back the sheets and put him to bed and gave me the razor to put in with my shaving kit until we came to some decision. It was Jess who did these things: the things a good person does.

7.

First year, June, seventh week of term It is striking to me now that it did not occur to any of us to telephone Isabella and persuade her to put off her visit. These days, if she were to call the house in San Ceterino, Mark would be cool and formal. He insists on speaking English with her, claiming that his Italian is too rusty to understand the rapid shower of her syllables. This is a lie; his Italian is perfect, far better than mine. But English slows her, brings her into a world of politeness, where she cannot quite bring off certain of her particular effects.

We did not think of our parents in this way though, not then: not as problems to be managed or contained, not even as entities quite separate from us.

So she arrived, as she had said she would, wearing a cream trouser suit and a wide-brimmed hat and carrying two turquoise suitcases. The wicker bag slung over her left arm, which appeared at first glance to contain a teddy bear, turned out on closer inspection to be a dog-carrier with the head of a little terrier puppy peeping incongruously out, like a gruesome experiment in dog-bag hybridization. She was still recognizable as the woman from the photographs older, of course, the skin creased around her eyes, her hands beginning to mottle with liver spots but nonetheless this was the woman whose half-naked form was displayed in a variety of poses on the walls of one of the small sitting rooms. I was reminded, suddenly, of Franny's horror at having heard Dr Rufus McGowan in bed with Mark. For all that we were here to learn, it was possible to have too much knowledge.

'Oooof!' She mimed wiping the sweat from her brow. 'It is so hot. And not a drop of water for me to drink.'

'You should have called from the station, Mamma,' said Mark. 'I would have come to get you.' He spread out his arms to embrace her.

'Momento,' she said, hoisting her bag. 'I must let Colonel Felipe out of his bag. Poor he, he has been so good.' She swung the bag round, released a hidden clasp and lifted the dog out. His legs waggled as she held him up. She deposited him on the terrace and he swayed slightly, before skittering off towards the rose bushes.

'I named him Colonel Felipe after my great-grandfather,' she said. 'He was a colonel in the army of Pavia. Seven hundred men were lost owing directly to his order to advance to the left, facing right. He meant to say, "To the right, facing left". Or ' she waved a hand uncertainly 'perhaps it was the other way. The poor man felt such shame he attempted suicide but owing to a defective pistol was unable to finish the task. He shot his right ear off instead. Is it not terribly sad?'

'Mamma ...' began Mark.

'Marco, do not stand there doing nothing. Bring some water please in a bowl for Colonel Felipe. He is thirsty.'

Mark backed away a pace or two, then turned and hurried through to the kitchen. While he was gone, Isabella introduced herself to us all. We tried to call her 'Signora Ranelli' or, in my case, 'Mrs Winters', momentarily forgetting that Mark's parents had been divorced for many years but she brushed off these attempts at formality.

'Isabella, please. Call me only Isabella. No Mrs,' she continued, 'no Signora. Isabella. Like one of your friends.'

As Mark returned from the house, carrying a deep pudding basin of water for the dog, Isabella frowned at him.

'No, no. Can you not see that this is too deep for poor Colonel Felipe? He will not be able to reach with his little head! Or he will drown! Bring a smaller bowl.'

Throwing a look of loathing at the dog that made me suspect he rather hoped to drown it, Mark went back into the house. We stood awkwardly in silence on the terrace until he returned a few moments later with a soup plate of water.

Isabella looked at him suspiciously.

'You do not look well, Marco. You do not speak. Do you sleep? Has he slept well?'

She looked around at all of us, frowning. We nodded eagerly, although it wasn't true: he hadn't slept well for days before her arrival.

'Good. You must learn to take care of yourself, Marco. Now give Colonel Felipe his water please.'

Mark, moving clumsily, put down the dog's water. It took a few eager sips, then stopped, its head cocked to one side, waiting. Isabella looked at it fondly and as if this, only this, had reminded her, she spread out her arms to Mark.

'Marrrrco, how good it is, how good to see you.'

She wrapped her glittering ring-coated fingers around his shoulders and pulled his face down to hers. She planted kisses on his cheeks, one two, one two. Then, quickly, she muttered something in Italian, too low and too fast for me to catch even if I had been able to understand it. Mark flinched. He took two rapid steps backwards.

'Now, my darlings,' she said, 'you will forgive me. I am so tired and it has been such a long way. Do you, perhaps, in all of this big house, have a chair?'

'Mamma ...' murmured Mark, but Emmanuella was already leading Isabella through the open French doors to the garden room. Isabella swung back and laced her arm through Jess's, who allowed herself to be taken through. Simon shrugged, picked up the turquoise cases and followed.

On the terrace, Colonel Felipe had finished his water and relieved himself on the terrace, and was now attacking a small privet bush, snarling and making little runs at it.

Franny reached out a tentative arm and touched Mark between the shoulder blades. He did not shrug her off.

She said, 'Are you all right?'

Mark smiled. 'God, yeah. She's a pain, though, isn't she?'

'Totally. Yeah, totally. D'you think we should bring the Colonel in?'

We stared in silence at Colonel Felipe. He had a branch of privet between his teeth and was shaking it about, yipping and pulling his lips back to bare his pink and black gums.

'I'm not going anywhere near the little rat.' He drew his foot back thoughtfully, balancing on one leg, as if about to aim a swift hard kick at the Colonel. For a moment, I thought he'd do it. But as he got close enough almost to brush the dog's fur, he pulled back, wheeled around and marched into the house.

' ... and all this doing was for nothing, for the villa fell from the cliff into the ocean!' Isabella finished as we walked through the French doors.

Simon guffawed appreciatively. In those few minutes, one of Isabella's suitcases had been opened. It was full of tissue-paper wrappings: pink and gold and green and white and blue. Isabella had taken Jess and Emmanuella to sit on either side of her and was patting their hands.

'Marco,' she said, 'you remember Ginella? We saw her that summer in Las Palmas?'

Mark nodded warily.

'I have been telling your friends about when ...' She looked at him, suddenly uncertain. 'Ah, it does not matter. Marco, I must hear all about your studies. Have you been working hard? Come here, come and sit by me.'

She patted the half-inch of space on the sofa between her and Jess. Mark, ignoring her, sat sullenly in a chair a little way off.

He indicated the tissue paper. 'So what's all this, Ma? Did you buy up half of Paris?'

'Oh!' said Isabella. 'Only a few things, some little things. For your friends.'

She bent over the suitcases and pulled out various gifts: a pair of leather driving gloves for Simon, a blank calfskin book for me, some bath salts and perfume in intricate glass bottles and silk scarves for the girls.

I felt uncomfortable. I was not accustomed to receiving expensive gifts, let alone from a friend's mother. Only Emmanuella knew the proper form. She swooped down on Isabella, kissed her, then wound her scarf around her neck, trying out different knots in the mirror. Simon, noticing how well this reception looked, put his gloves on too, but the effect was not the same.