But he had misjudged the room, and he had badly misjudged his mother.

It is a particular kind of insult, I have come to think, the one Arthur reached for in that office, and it is one that gets used against the old and the ill more than against anyone else.

Confused.

She didn’t know what she was doing.

She wasn’t herself.

It is the tool people use to erase an inconvenient decision, to overrule a person’s own clear wishes by declaring, after the fact, that the person was not really present to make them.

Arthur needed his mother to have been absent from her own choice, because a mother who was present had judged him and found him wanting.