That Monday I had just brought two tapes with me—Ricky Nelson Hits and The Definitive Shadows. After all, I had only planned on a trip to Luton. I slotted in Ricky and thought about Butler. Why had he disturbed me? He was the wrong boy in my coach, true. But I wondered if I would ever find the right one.

For start, I might never find him at all. Seven years ago my son had been taken to Leicester. Could I rely on him still being there? Nobody stayed put any more; my son’s life was as unreliable as anyone else’s.

Since my young day, the world had changed. John Lennon had been shot, pubs bleeped to video games and wives invited strange men under their duvets. Edward was growing up in a treacherous world and in an odd way he knew it better than I did, because until that September I had felt safe.

Marriage was for keeps, I thought. Marriage meant staying together, like my parents did, and raising a child. Mothers knitted. You opened the door to the smell of cooking.

Nobody thought about doing their own thing—like dyslexia, the word hadn’t been invented. My parents would have found such talk baffling and selfish. Lesley’s complaints would never have entered their heads; Mum had never hankered for Toronto.

These last few weeks I’d been realizing that the world had changed. Like Rip Van Winkle I was waking up. The spray sparkled on the motorway and I realized I was travelling into another England, my son’s England, and that despite being forty-two I was more innocent, for better or worse, than he could ever be. Wherever he lived.

I thought that I might not find him. And then I thought: what would happen if I did? In my daydreams he had been a sandy-haired boy, full of beans; he had been my ideal son. I suppose he was myself at eleven. But daydreams are easy. Easy to be a father when you’ve never been one. Butler hadn’t been easy. I’d only known him half an hour and I had nearly thumped him.

I decided not to think—not yet. Hello, Mary Lou, sang Ricky. Goodbye heart. My spirits rose. I was taking a day off, and I deserved it. I stopped at Watford Gap and filled up the coach with diesel.

One of the phones was working so I rang Costas’s shop and told him not to worry if he didn’t see my light that evening, I hadn’t done myself in. I don’t think he understood, because he replied: ‘Attaboy, you lucky sod. Glad you’re perking up.’

Then I found the estate agent who had sold us Croxley Road and told them to put it on the market. I pictured Eleni opening the door to a man holding one of those laser guns they use to measure rooms. She’d think they had come to shoot her.

It was lunch time. I ate a large plate of sausage and chips and watched a lorry-driver chat up his hitchhiker. She must have been Dutch because she rolled him a cigarette. Dutch girls smoke all the time; I’d seen them on my Bulb Weekends.