‘Thank you for taking the time to come round.’ I nudged him through the door and closed it behind him.

I went back to the kitchen and poured a drink before going out to the garden. ‘John, tell me what happened.’

He looked at me, his always startling face unbalanced by a swollen, black eye. ‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t be stupid. The police don’t come round for nothing.’

‘He was saying stuff I didn’t like, so I hit him.’

‘Well, that sounds really intelligent.’

John shrugged. ‘I’d do it again.’

‘Well, try not to, will you? Every time a policeman comes round here he asks me out. It’s getting boring.’ And John laughed.

I sat in the cluttered living room after John had gone to bed, the sky still blue at ten o’clock, marking undergraduate essays. But my mind wasn’t on it, my heart wasn’t in it. The ramblings of eighteen-year-old would-be philosophers, their minds too consumed by ego even to contemplate their insignificance in the face of metaphysics, frankly bored me. I sat back in the chair, poured another drink and thought of John. I knew he meant what he’d said - that he would do it again. And I had a good idea of what, exactly, Martin Sawyer had said to deserve it. Every time this happened, every time John defended my reputation, a policeman came to my house, remarked on my being single and implied that he could become the male of the household. It didn’t seem to occur to them that John had a father somewhere. Dai Davies, whose last word to me had been ‘No’.

And I’m thinking of what that boy is like now as he studies in the school at Exeter, towering over the other pupils, constantly frowning, his blue-blue eyes uncertain. I suspect he’s too nervous, too unsure of himself, these days even to contemplate burying his fist in someone’s face, however much he must want to.

23 June 1974

That Saturday afternoon, when John appeared with his sandy plank in the cottage at Noss Mayo, I was sitting at the back of the house in the garden, drinking wine and reading Kant inattentively (is there any other way of reading his impenetrable text?) as I thought of seeing Miles Brandrin that night. I remember listening to John hauling the wood through the house and out into the garden, trailing sand and sea-water. He’d found it, half buried, on the banks of the Yealm near Wembury, and dragged it miles to show me. His face was alive, his eyes dazzling blue, his black hair matted. He lugged it across the grass and dropped it at my feet.

‘Look, look what I found! How old do you think it is? Is it hundreds of years old? It looks like it. It might be worth hundreds of pounds.’ He knelt down and rubbed the sand from a faded, hand-painted word: ‘Merboy’. I noticed then that the veins on his hands and forearms were beginning to bulge, like small, green ropes under his brown skin.