The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

      Simon has five types of grunt:

      Ask him about his mother,

      his father,

      or his parents’ marriage,

      and you get a happy grunt for the first, a puzzled one for the second, and an incomprehensible bleat concerning the photo above.

      It’s possible to extract more interpretation, if you work at it.

      ‘Simon, what do you mean, “Uuugheugh … gghuaha … ehhghH”?’

      ‘Haaaghuggh … oooh … ghughghEH.’

      ‘These are your parents. You grew up with them. Is this photo an accurate reflection of their relationship or not?’

      ‘Aaaghurghh … gghahuugh … eeehghuGH … is that a dog in the middle? Oh, it’s a bag. If it had been a dog these might not have been my parents, just people who looked like my parents, because we didn’t have a dog.’

      ‘Don’t you think there’s something remarkable about this picture? Sitting back to back on a pebble beach in Southern England with something that looks like a dead bulldog between you?’

      Simon looks trapped and panicky.

      ‘Or is this just a snapshot of what marriage always is, to you?’

      The grunt-bleat means bafflement. Why should he find something odd about the photograph? It’s a photograph: one of those things (so rare in life) in which a fact is made immutable. Why muddy it with interpretation? Why, if you do muddy it, pick on that particular interpretation? It could be one of a million others.

      Simon is, verbally, one of the most adept and playful people I know – as long as he doesn’t have to speak.

      Or use metaphor.

      Or comment on photographs.

      Simon’s parents’ marriage (according to other members of the family) was not happy or unhappy, just mannered and soulless.

      The puzzled father-grunt Simon gives about his father signifies a lack of interest. The happy mother-grunt, ‘loveliness’. Loveliness is the only adjective Simon associates with Helene Norton. She ‘embodied’ the word, he says. There isn’t need for others – and he doesn’t mean ‘loveliness’ because of her startling beauty, which Simon claims he’d never noticed until I started ogling her, but ‘loveliness’ because of … because of … uuuggghhhAH! Grunt Number Four: Frustrated Grunt.

      What’s the point of me demanding new words when he’s already given me the one that works to perfection?

      ‘Loveliness’ does not mean uncensoriousness, however. When his mother was alive, Simon used to visit her in London every two or three weeks, but she refused to greet him until he’d had a bath.

      Then she would criticise his clothes.

      ‘If it wasn’t one thing, it was another,’ remembers Simon forlornly. ‘I got the feeling I could never satisfy her. Did it count if your clothes were wrong in the period before you’d had a chance to spruce up between the front door and the bath?’

      After trying to ‘spruce up’ he’d step out of the bathroom in the fresh clothes that his mother kept in a cupboard, ready for his visits, and expecting now to be allowed to kiss her hello. ‘But I’d almost certainly forget something, and she’d draw attention to that one thing and home in on it. My shirt was wrong, or my shoelaces were undone. I hadn’t done up my trousers correctly.’

      He gives a purgatorial groan.

      ‘It was too much for me.’

      Two or three days after his mother’s death (Simon remembers it as ‘rather too quickly’) he and his two brothers let themselves into her five-bedroom apartment near Baker Street, and began picking over her possessions. From their mother’s cupboards and drawers they extracted everything small and unbreakable and piled it on the floor. Then they shuffled among the piles – in my image of this spectral, sacrificial scene I imagine them as three tall birds, and hear the clicking of their feet on the parquet floors – plucking up anything that took their fancy.

      There was only one item Simon wanted: a photograph of his mother in old age.

      There were paintings of her, when she was young and glorious. Simon wasn’t interested. He’d had nothing to do with her in those days. He doesn’t like portraits at the best of times, but he prefers at least that they correlate to an image already in his brain.

      He held out his arms, eyes closed, to any other things the brothers didn’t take , then brought the fifty-or-sixty-item windfall back to a small flat he owns in London. There he laid them out, ten layers deep along one edge of the living room, like drying fish fillets.

      Simon tells me he would like to hang the pictures up.

      His mother has been dead nine years now, but the haul remains stacked against the wall, curing itself slowly of connotations. ‘Loveliness’ now resides only in the photograph of her old age and his memories.

      The leftovers in his mother’s apartment – her letters, wrapped in pink ribbon, from a man who was not Simon’s father; her skirts and chemises, brooches, diamond pins, fur coats, perfumes, old swing-band records – the brothers sold, gave away or threw in the dustbin.

      ‘But you also got all your old school reports and exercise books, and the folder of newspaper clippings about when you won the Maths Olympiads and went to Cambridge, your IQ report?’

      ‘As I say, I didn’t want them.’

      ‘Then why take them?’

      ‘Why not take them?’

      Simon is always eager to drop in schoolboyish retorts like this. The trick is to become instantly absurd.

      ‘Would you have taken them had they been roast chickens?’

      ‘Heh, heh, heh, hnnn. I took them because it’s the sort of thing people do take, isn’t it?’

      See? Simple, when you know how.

      To Simon, correct conduct is like a wood. It has many trees, which represent how things ought to be done; one tree for each circumstance. It is a large wood, sterile and rather dark. The stormy forest where he goes to hunt for the Monster is infinitely more comforting.

      Here’s Simon’s brother!

      Hello, Michael!

      He doesn’t have much to say.

      ‘Is it surprising?’ he protests, leaping up, holding out his hand – a strong shake. ‘I’m ten years older than Simon is. We were like different families. I studied chemistry at university, not mathematics; that’s a different language. Simon is interested in chemistry also? Really? I never knew. His favourite element is Boron? I’m surprised! Would you like some tea? Organic Lapsang or elderflower?’

      Michael Norton OBE is the author of Writing Better Fundraising Applications, The WorldWide Fundraiser’s Handbook, The Complete Fundraising Handbook and Getting Started in Fundraising. Money – in particular other people’s money – is a big subject in Michael’s life. He wants it to pay for environmental revolution.

      His latest book is 365 Ways to Change the World: How to Make a Better World Every Day.