Not that evening but the following one Alison talked confidentially to me. We were in her bedroom, sitting on the bed. Silver and Andrew were in the kitchen, arguing about the cost of the provisions we had brought. Well, Silver never argued, he just stood his ground, saying he knew food was expensive, it was more expensive in London than up north where Andrew and Alison came from, and especially so when bought at these small local supermarkets. Andrew moaned about what would become of them when their money ran out. As it happened, Silver had offered to pay for some of what we brought, a generosity that angered me and made me tell him afterward that this was what came of having money left one when one was too young to understand how to manage it. Andrew grumbled and scrutinized the receipts we had given him, and Alison and I went into her bedroom, closing the door behind us.

She told me how she’d had an abortion when she was seventeen. Something had gone wrong, this was just before the 1967 Act legalizing abortion, and her fallopian tubes were blocked. She didn’t know until she got married and tried to have a child.

“That wasn’t Andrew, though?” I said.

“That was my first husband, Charles Barrie. We were divorced, but I kept his name. My mother didn’t like the idea of me using my maiden name— well, things were different then.” She made a face. “Later on I lived with Andrew and we got married when we wanted to adopt a child.”

I said I knew that, though admitting this knowledge made me feel like a gossip, memorizing details from newspaper stories.

“Men often don’t care whether they have children or not,” she said. “It’s been my luck, or maybe my ill-luck, that the two significant men in my life both wanted children. Charles didn’t. Life’s strange, isn’t it? Between Charles and Andrew I had a boyfriend who was a doctor from Kerala. If he hadn’t wanted children so much we’d maybe have married.”

“Kerala? That’s India?”

“That’s in the south of India. If I’d married him, the social services wouldn’t have stopped us adopting Jason. We’d have been the right mix for taking a mixed-race child. Ironic, eh?”

That was “what if” if ever I heard one. But I thought, as I always do, even when dwelling on “what ifs” of my own, how about all the imponderables, the different places you might have lived in, the different people you’d have known, the quite other way your thought processes might have developed, not to mention your desires and needs and the level of your happiness or its reverse? The possibility Alison cited scarcely seemed ironical to me but just appeared the complicated way life arranges itself.