I put the photo in a drawer. My first two thoughts were as clear as crystal. Now, on this earth, I had a son. And that my birthday was in January too, the 19th. I was a Capricorn like him. And that neither he nor his mother would ever know.

And then I went to the pub on the corner, which I’d never gone to because it’s Watneys, and for the first time in my life I drank myself under the table.

A few months later the lease expired on the driving school; they were knocking it down to build a Freezer Centre. So I moved away, back to South London where I’d grown up, and I thought that an episode in my life had come to an end.

But in a sense, like Edward, it was just beginning.

Three

By the time my marriage ended and I was living above Costas’s shop, me and my corrugated Motor Sports, Edward was eleven. I hadn’t seen him, of course. I didn’t even know where he lived now. Lesley had never liked North London; she had only stayed for the Polytechnic and she had probably moved on. She had never replied to my letters and I had given up years before. But I still felt a lurch at odd moments, when I read in the paper about a mugging in Highbury, or even when I saw the football results on TV and the name Arsenal appeared. Years before there had been some violence on the pitch and I pictured him living nearby, maybe he had heard the roar. Maybe he had even been taken there. Maybe—he would have been nine then—maybe he liked football and watched the match every Saturday. Perhaps Lesley was married and her husband took him. It caught me unawares, a moment like this, and I felt punched in my chest as if I’d been winded.

You mustn’t think I was obsessed. I didn’t think about him all the time; I hadn’t framed his photo. He was just there. He existed, and sometimes the fact of his existence made my knees weak. I remembered his birthday each year. I couldn’t send him anything, of course—I had nowhere to send it to. But I looked in toyshop windows. When he was four I looked at plastic fire engines labelled 2–5 Years and imagined him pushing one along; when he was seven I saw some Matchbox cars that were much more sophisticated than when I was little, but I had loved them and hoped somebody was buying them for him, though I could never picture who that someone might be. I had only known Lesley; all the people Edward had met since then would be unknown to me. It made him seem separate and experienced, like a foreign child.

I wondered, of course, about his looks. I’m sandy and freckled, and I wondered if he had Lesley’s dark hair. Sometimes, just for a moment, I felt like a real father—when I caught myself worrying about his asthma, for instance. I had had it for a few years; it had ended when I was ten, and I wondered if somewhere in Britain he was wheezing, and I longed to tell him that if he was like me it wouldn’t last.