“Jason’s not really a mixed-race child at all,” she said. “He had an Asian mother but he’s been brought up—if you can call it that—by white people exclusively. In the children’s home where he was there were black children, but if he’d been white, I mean if he’d been one of the white children, black children would have been there as well. I didn’t put that very well.”

I said I knew what she meant. I put my hand over hers and she gave me a watery smile. “I told Andrew about his father. He was very upset. He had a sort of wild idea he could go to the funeral in disguise. Of course that was completely stupid, he didn’t really mean it. Has there been anything more in the papers?”

“Nothing about you for two or three days,” I said and then we went back into the living room. Andrew got out an album they had brought with them and showed us photographs of the street they lived in and Jason in their garden and their house. It was very much like my parents’ house, thirties Tudor. I made the comparison in my mind and I think that was the first time I thought of my old home as my parents’ house and not “ours.” The car on the garage drive was a Mercedes. This was middle-class prosperity, to which the social services would have objected less if Andrew had been that doctor from Kerala.

Looking about me at the contrast, at Louis Robinson’s bleak fourth floor, I reflected on what some people will risk for the sake of having a child and what they will sacrifice. Would I? What made it harder to understand was that surely most of such ventures failed, perhaps all failed. I said something like that to Silver on our way home. His reply surprised me, for he said that this wasn’t so, we only got to hear about the ones that failed because that made a better story. For instance, the parent of a child or children who failed to win custody, usually the father, often successfully managed to abduct those children and take them abroad. I must have read of cases that only came into the news when the mothers tried to get those children back. Their efforts were usually in vain.

Handing back the photograph album, Silver asked Andrew how they proposed leaving this country. He didn’t answer at once. Alison’s sigh was audible. Her talk to me had left her in a state of heightened emotion and she said almost passionately, “If I could keep Jason, if we could, I’d be willing to stay here forever. Even in these circumstances, even never being able to go out, see our friends, talk on the phone to people, I could put up with that for him.”