I thought that if I had children I’d be doing something better than this. Forty-two and I was still a coach driver. It was a temporary sort of job, working for Reg. All my life I seemed to have been drifting from episode to episode—driving instructor, mini-cab driver, coach driver—and I’d never made up my mind what I really wanted to do. Trouble was, there was nobody to do it for, no young family who’d make me feel constructive. I’d just been biding my time. I should have set up my own driving school, years before—I’d enjoyed doing that and we had built up a lot of custom—but the business with Edward had knocked the wind out of my sails and I’d just taken the first offer that came along, me and my four-door Cortina, which I had then, and that was mini-cabs. I’m probably making excuses, but that’s how it seemed and there was nobody there to contradict me. You wind things tighter and tighter, don’t you, until you get locked.

October was wet. The buses hissed by and I was living in limbo. I’d worked my way through Costas’s repertoire of video films. There was only The Exterminator and Kung Fu pictures left and I couldn’t face those. Marooned in the high street, surrounded by Safeways and Burton’s, I was on an island. Eleni had stolen six years of my life, she’d thrown them into the front garden and stamped on them. Not content with that, she had made a thorough job with the previous years. She had always been incredibly jealous of anyone I’d met before she came along. I’d protested, truthfully, that there hadn’t been much and that I loved her more than anybody. But under her C & A sweater beat a fiery Mediterranean heart. I say fiery but now I’d say hysterical. Anyway one day, when I was away at the Edinburgh Tattoo, she cut up all my photos.

It was because I’d told her about Edward. I thought she would understand. I’d just stated the facts: I said it happened years ago, that his mother and I’d had this fleeting thing, and that’s what made it so sad—that something so unimportant could create a child. I said that I missed him.

She went quiet. Then, a few minutes later, she jumped up and started to rearrange the furniture. She said she couldn’t stand magnolia, we’d got to repaint the lounge, and wasn’t Orpington boring, let’s move, let’s go to Canada. She quite often behaved like this so I didn’t get worried. In fact, because I’d told her about Edward and she had appeared to listen, I felt we were closer than usual.

I had this drawer of photos—my parents, who were both dead; me at various stages of childhood, mostly on beaches; snapshots of Continental holidays and various mates’ stag nights, that sort of thing. There were one or two girlfriends—giggly ones in a passport photo booth, Polaroids at parties, a nice girl called Gwen whom I took on holiday to the Brecon Beacons—but really not much, considering I was thirty-six when I got married. And, of course, the photo of Edward.