Recently, actually, I’ve begun to get irritated with him. He watches TV all the time, and when I try to use the stapler there aren’t any staples left in it. One of the things I’ve learnt: a child is different from an adult because nothing stays the way you left it—the toolbox, the dials on your radio. For the first months I was so nice to him that it felt as if we were in some Doris Day film, when it’s always a sunny Saturday and nobody can breathe. Sometimes now, when I nag him, I sound just like the parents I used to hear in Croxley Road, when I hadn’t a clue about anything. I almost sound like a father.

Hilda and I look after him during the week, while Lesley’s in London. He doesn’t seem to think this is funny. After all, marriage is a weird enough arrangement—Stan, one of my drivers, he’s just got hitched to his divorced wife’s sister.

Or, more to the point: every arrangement is a weird sort of marriage. Hilda’s and mine is. It seems to be based on loving Ovaltine and Edward. We sleep in twin beds (well, there’s no other room in Leaps Road), and at night we read each other bits from our books. I’m sure there’s something not very ongoing, as Lesley might say, about all this, but who’s she to talk? We gossip about the awful women Lesley brings down from London, where she’s running a course on campaigning for crèches (she never made a go of the junk shop). She’s taken Vicky with her, but Edward couldn’t go because of his school. Anyway, he didn’t want to.

Edward is a teenager! I’ll practically be a grandfather before I’ve been a father! It’s dusk. We drive back home, past a row of bungalows and some dry trees, bent by the wind. I know every inch of these roads; I’ve juddered along them a hundred times with my learner drivers.

Edward slots in one of his cassettes. Despite a two-year campaign he still jeers at my taste in music and I jeer at his. In the windows, lights are being switched on.

‘Woo-aaa,’ moans the tape. ‘Worjame grinda ja-way gang …’

Sometimes I still believe that, inside those houses, people know the secrets that I’ve never learnt. In a moment, either a) all will be revealed, or b) it will be too late, and Edward will be a grown man with children of his own and I’ll never have caught up.

‘Manarje manarje …’ it goes, or something like that.

‘You understand this?’ I ask.

He shakes his head.

‘I used to get the words all wrong. There was this song, “Poetry in Motion”—’

‘Dad!’ he groans. ‘You’ve told me.’