Jenny comes back and makes a pot of tea. Without waiting for it to draw sufficiently, she pours three mugs and we each hold one in our hands. My mug is from Tesco and it doesn’t retain heat well. Jerome tells me that he’s sorry, that he wanted to meet up with Jenny as a friend because he doesn’t know many people in the area, how he never for one moment intended to cause a rift between myself and Jenny. It’s a flawed argument but I don’t say anything. I am not a man to let myself down and so I play along with Jerome. I tell him that I don’t know what came over me. I tell him that I curse myself every day about it.

Once the tea is drunk, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for Jerome to extend his stay and I say that we have to think about getting dinner ready for the children. I ask him about his own son and as he is going out the door I tell him that I’m sorry that he has lost his wife.

46. The Innocence of Childhood

I spend my days now thinking back on happier times, like the time last year when we couldn’t wait to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Jenny; the children and I. We, as a family, smiled at her face. Her eyes had a redness in them, as though she had been crying. I presented her with a sketchpad, made of pages of coarse undyed paper. The pencils I had bought to go alongside it were as dark as ebony and they came in a wooden box which I imagined Jenny could reuse to store tiny shells or fragments of sea glass.

The children gave her gifts: chocolate and bubble bath, and she thanked them even though bubble bath gave her a rash. I put on some music and Jenny danced with the children in the kitchen and their laughter was contagious and so I joined them and it didn’t matter really that the kitchen was too small for that kind of behaviour and our bodies touched each other, in our tangle of arms and legs, and it was heavenly to be dancing like that, with my wife, and with my children.

After the dancing there was the cake and Jenny said that she didn’t feel forty-one and I told her that she didn’t look it. The process of ageing was, after all, something that you couldn’t control. Life could not stand still for us to enable us to remain in that one moment of bliss when everything was great between us. Despite the pressure of caring for our children, who seemed to follow us everywhere we went, for the most part we were content with what we had achieved together. Special occasions made me philosophical.