‘Thanks for the company,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you sleepy?’ she mumbled. She said something about a hanky. I fished in my pocket. But then I realized she’d not said that, she’d said something about ‘hanky-panky’. Eyes closed, she wagged her finger at me.

I shook my head, reassuring her. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I’m a gent.’

She fell asleep. I touched her shoulder, awkwardly, in its flannel nightie. Then I tiptoed out of the room.

I was wide-awake. I had arrived at last; nothing could steal these hours from me, now I was here but not yet announced. I had a few hours’ daydreaming left, and I was not going to smoke.

I drove down to the seafront, switched off my headlights and gazed at the water. I’ve never understood the moon; blink and it’s moved. Since my arrival, an hour before, it had slipped down the sky and shifted to one side. You could trust the good old sun to rise in the right place at the right time, appearing with its flushed face like a pub regular. The moon was as unpredictable as a woman; try snatching at its reflection and all you’d get were empty hands.

I heard the waves. The lake at Windermere made silly little laps; they had reminded me of my wife. Everything had reminded me of my wife—bottle-tops could remind me of my wife. They had told me that I had loved her but I had never liked her. No wonder I’d felt poorly.

The sea’s noise was different. It was so vast that it had no borders; rhythmic sighs but more than that, sounds beyond sound. I thought of all the children sleeping in the town behind me. They breathed in unison, vastly; they sighed and turned.

It was strange—the nearer I got to Edward, the more he dispersed. He became scattered into everybody else’s children. It was like moving close to a newspaper photo and finding that, in fact, it was only made up of little dots. When I was young, and noticed this for the first time, I had felt tearful, as if the person in the photo didn’t exist at all.

I crawled around the town at 20 mph, looking for Leaps Road. I knew I would find it sooner or later and I was in no hurry. In the dark, I felt like somebody in one of those videos I had been watching—a cop or a criminal. Finally, at four o’clock, I spotted the sign and turned left into a suburban road.

They were semis; they reminded me of Snetterton Road, Bromley, where I was born, and of Croxley Road, Orpington, where I had failed in my marriage. An ordinary sort of place. All the curtains were closed. Number 14 had a fir tree in its front garden and a battered van parked outside.