‘Do you know how much things cost down there?’ she says.
            ‘It’s a good package.’
            She flares her nostrils. ‘They need all those coloured-in maps in a city like that too then?’
            Dan spent a fruitless half hour, once, trying to explain to her what he did, back when we’d first met and were still awkward and polite and not quite sure if we were built to last.
            ‘I work with Geographical Information Systems,’ he’d said.
            ‘Well, you’ve lost me already,’ my mother quipped.
            ‘It’s maps; using maps to represent data, about anything – asthma sufferers, heart attack victims, wages, unemployment, age. You show the information on a map, in different colours. You can do it over a period of time – see how things change.’
            My mother said she’d seen things change with her own two eyes. She said it struck her that people like him would be better off asking people like her how things had changed, never mind bothering with multi-coloured maps. Dan launched off on a new tack – statistics, trends, three-dimensional modelling. My mother is not entirely lacking in grace, and she smiled and nodded and made the right kinds of noises, but I could tell she wasn’t listening to a word of it.

            ‘I have a class,’ I say. ‘I should go in a minute. ’
            ‘You’ll give all this up for him?’
            I try to imagine Dan and me in London, but all I can picture is two small children standing on a train station surrounded by suitcases.
            ‘It’ll be an adventure,’ I say with false heartiness. ‘It’s time I moved on, isn’t it?’ I finish my tea, unhook my handbag from the chair-leg and place it on my lap.

3

  

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