John frowned. ‘What’s that mean? Merboy?’

‘Well, he’s like a mermaid, but instead of being a girl he’s a boy. It’s a boy with a fish’s tail instead of legs, covered with silver scales and little fins. A boy who lives in the sea, who swims with dolphins and seals.’

And he looked up and smiled. ‘That’s me.’ Then he sat suddenly and slumped against my legs, rubbing the painted word.

‘Had a good day?’ I asked, untangling his hair with my fingers.

Merboy nodded as he watched a yacht easing its way to a pontoon strung along the middle of the Yealm. ‘I’m going to be a sailor and have my own boat. And I’m going to have air tanks and go diving. I’m going to sail round the world.’

‘I know.’

The two of us sat in the hot sun, Merboy dreaming of circling the globe as I dreamed of Miles.

15 April 1999

I’m trying to read in my journal what I wrote about when I first saw John in the hospital. I can barely make it out, my writing is so spidery-drunk. I try to break the cycle — try to avoid the whisky and the introspection that follows. But it always catches up with me. This journal - it’s the only thing I talk to now apart from Ellen and I don’t talk to her often enough. Not a journal, really. More a memoir. An aide-memoire for the times when whisky has destroyed my memories. I have a mound of notebooks in the house which I’ve filled over the years, filled with trivia, with ideas, snippets from newspapers, letters. Who will ever read them? Why am I preserving my life? I write because, like John, I find it hard to speak to people. We’re still so damaged.

There was a wild storm today, gales and lashing rain. Some tiles were lifted and a branch from the plane tree was torn off. It smashed the cloches as it fell. I watched the clouds scud across the bay, so low they brushed the hills. The rain pelted against the windows of the conservatory, endless, a river moving over glass. The sea was grey and white, rocking backwards and forwards, like water in a vast bowl, blankets of spume moving with it. I stared at that grey and white world for hours, and the colours inside the house, when I finally turned away, were so loud they hurt my eyes.

27 June 1999

I drove up to Oxfordshire this weekend to see Ellen. She’s still so good for me because even now, after all this time, when I’m with her I don’t drink so much. She stays up with me, talks and plays cards, reads, whatever it takes to match my going to bed. She doesn’t say I can’t drink, has never said that, but she knows I respect her too much to render myself speechless with alcohol. So I have a few glasses, eke them out over the evening, fighting the desire to tip the bottle on its end. We talk but we skirt subjects -her dead husband, my deaf son, her cancer, my face. These are not cheerful subjects for conversation. Instead we discuss exhibitions, books, travel, politics, films — Teflon, hard-edged subjects which omit the personal. Of course, there is the matter of conviction, of preference, of choice. But these things are not what Ellen and I would consider personal.