“I kept you three days. I looked after you, I gave you everything you wanted. I loved you. You had all the sweets and chocolate you wanted. I got toys for you.” Alison was crying by then. Her face wasn’t contorted but the tears ran down her cheeks. “My mother came over unexpectedly. She was terribly angry, not a bit understanding. I hadn’t seen any newspapers, I hadn’t watched television or listened to the radio. I’d just concentrated on you, Michael. I didn’t know there’d been all that hue and cry. My mother said I either let her take you back or she’d go straight to the police.” She wiped her eyes with her fingers.

“It was all right for her. She’d had three children. She took you back. I thought I’d die, I was distraught, I was really mad then. I couldn’t bear to look at that ship in a bottle because you’d loved it, you’d played with it, put it by your bed at night. I asked my mother to take it away, get it out of my sight.”

Andrew got up and walked out of the room. He slammed the door just as he had slammed the window. Alison was sobbing now, her head down on the table. Her body shook. Silver stood over her. Just as I’d thought she was going to touch him ten minutes before, so I fancied he was about to touch her. He didn’t.

“Stop crying, Alison.”

His use of her first name helped. He said it again.

“Stop crying, Alison. Stop it now.”

She lifted her head. Her face was red and swollen, a wet terrain of puffs and pouches. Even her hair was damp. She ran the fingers of one hand through it. “I suppose you won’t want to do anything for us now. You won’t want to help us.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “It makes no difference.”

But it made an enormous difference. As we lay on our bed side by side later on that night, I sensed for both of us that our whole attitude toward them had changed. Andrew we had always distrusted and, while making allowances for his situation and the plight he found himself in, rather disliked. But Alison had been a perfect woman, self-denying, maternal, enormously patient and kind. If we had lately seen Andrew as a less suitable father than we had thought at first, Alison had remained the ideal parent, so that the social services’ bias against her, for any reason, seemed groundless and cruel. Now she emerged as a woman who would have had a criminal record if her mother hadn’t intervened. We both wondered how many other attempts at securing a baby there had been, for we couldn’t believe she had been content with childlessness for the sixteen years between the abduction of Silver and fostering of Jason.