‘I wanted one, you see. I’m trying to be upfront, Des.’ She moved the plastic tomato, as if that would help. ‘We’d better not see each other again.’

There was a pause. I said: ‘You just wanted me so you could pass your test.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘No one else would have got you through.’

‘Don’t be so simplistic,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so male.’

‘I am male!’ I shouted. ‘I’m going to be a father!’

There was a silence. She started stirring her tea again.

‘Not really,’ she said.

And then she got up and paid our bill.

I only told one person—Eric, who ran the driving school with me. He laughed and said I was a lucky bugger. He said: ‘Most birds’d be suing you for paternity.’ He hadn’t a clue what I was talking about.

Lesley wouldn’t see me. She closed ranks, just as Eleni did years later. Women do that; they’ve always got people on tap. The first time I went round she had an awful woman from the CND there; she was built like a site foreman and she’d never liked me.

The second time her parents were staying. Lesley was hardly on speaking terms with them but there they were, ensconced in her flat and glaring at me as if I was Bluebeard. She was looking pale; she said she’d thrown up outside Boots that morning but she wouldn’t let me comfort her. She quarrelled with us all—first me and then her parents—but it was me who was made to leave. On the way home I thought of her feeling sick with our child and got such a stomach ache I had to stop the car.

I tried writing to her. I asked her what was she going to tell the child, would it never know who its father was? She wrote back—short letters with surprisingly childish writing—telling me not to crowd her, not to get heavy, she was quite all right, she could combine having a baby with finishing her studies. She never answered the right questions. She said she’d tell me when the baby was born, but that was it. She sealed the envelopes with Save the Trees stickers. I thought: why the hell is she so kind to trees?

When the baby was born, I thought she would see reason. Motherhood changed women, everybody said so. Anyway, when it cried all night she’d want a man around to change its nappies.

By this time, I must say, I couldn’t remember how close we had ever been. I certainly couldn’t say if I really wanted to marry her. She was right; we hadn’t much in common. She had dwindled in my head, back into the distance; she was as unknown as in the first days I’d met her, but changed and hostile and stupidly important. She was a different woman by now—God knows what she thought of me but in a strange way I felt bound to her for life.

In January a letter arrived with the Save the Trees sticker. It was stiff; that’s because there was a photo inside. It showed a baby, wrapped in a yellow shawl and held by a headless pair of arms. The letter said that here was a photo as promised, it was a little boy and he had been born on January 5 which made him a Capricorn, and that made him harmonious with her as she was Gemini, or something. He was fine and healthy, she was calling him Edward, and she preferred me not to get in touch again, but wished me all the best for the future.