He came to sit next to me and I offered him tea. He shook his head and pulled a half-eaten bar of chocolate from his pocket. We sat for a while, hip to damaged hip, in the sand, watching the volcanic arch trying to snare the falling sun.

‘What happened to my father?’ John asked, his teeth brown.

And I thought I should have known from the curve of his spine, the dip of his neck, that he was burdened with a loaded question. Should have guessed that this was the question.

‘Well.’ I pushed at the sand with the toe of my shoe, watched the silvery grains cascade down my instep. ‘Well. He left. You have chocolate on your teeth. It’s bad for them.’

‘I know that. I want to know why he left.’

Oh, so do I, John, so do I. ‘Look, it’s getting cold. Why don’t we go back to the house and try roasting those marshmallows?’

‘Why did he leave?’ John was tugging at the grass, pulling it up in unyielding clumps, his back bent in the wind.

‘John, it’s late and it is cold.’

‘You’re changing the subject.’

‘No, I’m simply changing the location.’ I creaked to my feet and brushed the blanket free of sand before folding it.

He crouched on the sand and looked up at me — a rare occurrence — and said, ‘I’ll come with you if you promise to tell me about my father. I’ll come if you don’t change the subject.’ He was squinting as the sun slipped below the low-slung, grey clouds on the ocean’s horizon and flashed its last blinding, pale light across the beach. His eyes were chips of abalone shell in the late-winter air.

The prospect of an ice-sweating whisky was, I have to say, a more attractive proposition than explaining in detail to my son the perfidy of his father. More desirable than the prospect of describing yet another chapter of failure in my life. But … I’d always known he would ask this question one day. I’d had fourteen years to prepare an answer and was disconcerted to find myself still unready. I fingered the cicatrix over my eyebrow, where skin and worries meet and knit, and nodded. I held my hand out to him to help him haul his many-times-broken bones upright but he shook his head and grunted as he stood unassisted. I suppose he felt that if he was old enough to deal with perfidy, he was old enough to stand on his own two feet.

We walked the slow curve of the beach, our footprints crunching, feet apart from each other. I kept ducking my head, although the golf course was closed, imagining misdirected cannonballs flying past. We passed the point where a sandy path slides on to the beach, where I had stood years before wondering where John was as he lay near-mortally wounded by a bottle of lemonade which fell from the sky. I found myself smiling and I glanced at my boy and he smiled shyly back at me and I thought, We have a life, we have a history, but then I remembered that I was about to describe some of that history and I speeded up, heading towards the bottle of whisky in the kitchen cabinet.