I kept pace with his growing-up, at one remove, by looking at other children. I’m an only child so I don’t have relations, but I watched my Greek in-laws, and in the early days I stopped at playgrounds and watched the little kids on the swings. I would catch a ball that a boy kicked to me, and ask his mother his age. I watched women zipping up their children’s jackets and ticking them off for losing their gloves. It amazed me, that they took their children for granted.

When he was older and I was married and living in Orpington I watched the boys racing down our street on their chopper bikes; it was a great place for kids, trees and gardens and even sort of fields nearby. I’d hear the mothers calling them in to tidy their rooms, usually angrily—why were parents always irritable? It was easy for me, of course. All the same, I envied them their annoyance.

You would think it might fade away, as the years passed; that I’d start to forget him. But I didn’t. Funnily enough it grew stronger. I missed him. It was probably because I had no kids of my own. I’d think of the population of London and whether, statistically, I’d bump into him one day in Oxford Street and neither of us would know. Sandy-haired boys caught my attention, but often I’d get their age wrong—it’s easy to do that. Sometimes I’d be hired for theatre outings, some pantomime, and I’d stand there helping them down and watching the crowds of kids, boys in red anoraks and blue ones and two-tone ones; boys in school blazers. I just thought about the possibility.

Eleni didn’t want children. I hadn’t realized that when I married her. The subject hadn’t come up—it doesn’t really, does it? I had just presumed we would have them one day. In fact, part of her attraction came from her big Greek family. I thought that at last I was connected to something large and fertile, and that she’d want to settle down.

But I hadn’t reckoned on her temperament. Soon I realized that in fact she had married me to get out. She wanted to be a dancer and, though she never quite made it, she always thought her big moment was just around the corner. How could she swell up when next week Bernard Delfont might be phoning?

In a sense she was as liberated as Lesley—if liberation means being selfish, which in my bitter moments I decided it did. She was a different sort of person, she did it in a feminine way. She wasn’t as clever as Lesley and she was proud of her looks—she was working on her body rather than her mind—but in the end it all boiled down to the same thing: I lost out.

All through September and into October I lay in Costas’s flat. As I watched the street lamps glow through my blanket, pinned to the window, I brooded about my life. I suppose I was feeling bitter about everything, even my work which nowadays seemed like a lot of backache at inconvenient hours. I was too tired to be jovial with a bunch of old dears on their day out to Thanet. Why should I? What had they done for me? Them and their endless stops for the toilet. We ran a twice-weekly trip to Boulogne, to the hypermarket, and the shoppers filled me with gloom; they clutched their duty-frees so greedily, as if £2 off was really so important. This worried me; I’m usually sociable. Reg even puts me on the sports runs for the Rotarians, so you can see what I’m like. I thought I might be having a nervous breakdown and I looked at myself cautiously, as if it was happening to somebody else.