the professional conversationalist (pp. 29–31)

The Gertrude question enters the novel exactly this way: as a father's paranoid raving. Disguised as a "professional conversationalist," Himself works himself into a delusional aria about Avril's supposed treasons — the DuPlessis/Luria liaison, "certain weekly shall we say maternal… assignations with a certain unnamed bisexual bassoonist," "your own dear grammatical mother's cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attachés." It is unmistakably the ranting of an ill man (the running fake nose, the veal-marsala sweater-vest), and that is the durable trap the book sets: the mother's infidelities are introduced through the least reliable possible narrator, her own husband mid-hallucination, so that when later scenes quietly substantiate the Wayne liaison and the DuPlessis connection the reader can never fully disentangle what Avril actually did from what Himself's paranoia invented. The Gertrude frame arrives pre-contaminated by the very suspicion it describes — accusation and symptom fused at the source.