When I woke it was three in the morning and I’d had my first wet dream for years.

I told you I was superstitious. When I woke next the sun was shining and the sky was that solid blue that makes your eyeballs ache. What a terrific omen! I headed across country towards the M6.

When I got to Windermere I planned to buy some under-pants and a pair of pyjamas. It was the sort of old-fashioned town that would still have a gents’ outfitters. Eleni hadn’t let me wear pyjamas—she had giggled at mine and said I looked like a dirty old man—but they made me feel secure and there was no Eleni now, giggling and sneering and cheating at Scrabble.

It wasn’t her cheating, actually, that was annoying. It was the way she wrong-footed me. Suddenly she would want to play a game—she wore that bright, hectic look that made me wary—and then halfway through, just when I’d found a good word like ‘EPISTLE’, she’d get bored. Worse than that—contemptuous. ‘What a stupid game,’ she’d sigh, and for her next word she’d lay out ‘SO’. She wasn’t great at Scrabble but she was better than that. What can you do with women? They play games with you all the time, and when the moment comes to play a real one they suddenly cop out and make you foolish.

A son would understand. I had high hopes of Edward this morning. Not only was he ‘absolutely gorgeous’ (Pam) and ‘a charmer’ (Mrs Selwyn): he was a chap.

Beyond Stoke-on-Trent I joined the M6. Travelling along the middle lane, I wondered why Lesley had gone to Windermere. It was the sort of place where people retired and I wondered if her parents lived there. I knew so little about her. If I knew their town I could have phoned them, the grandparents of my child, and saved myself a lot of bother.

I felt resentful, that she hadn’t got on with them; it was so thoughtless of her. This made us suddenly close, as if she had been sitting beside me in the coach, biting her nails. Love makes a woman vague, doesn’t it? She appears all misty. Irritation, on the other hand, pulls her close, crystal-clear. My mother said that after Dad died she missed him the most when she found the things that had always annoyed her, like his cigarette bums on the loo windowsill.

I slotted in The Shadows for the third time. Perhaps Lesley hadn’t joined her parents; perhaps she had become a spinsterly Lake District person, wearing a jerkin and driving a Metro. There were lots of women like that there, middle-aged before their time. Perhaps she had become a social worker. Perhaps she had opted out and lived in a farmhouse, ruddy-faced and breeding sheep. Edward would stomp about in the mud and shoot crows with his catapault. They would welcome me with a mug of tea and I would fix the guttering, a man at last.