“Let’s say I’m trying very hard not to. At least I know now I wasn’t abandoned on a beach with the tide coming in.”

The first installment of Nelima Patel’s life story had appeared in the Sunday paper. She might have had a strong personality, an interesting character, but whatever she had, none of it came through. It had clearly been written for her by a journalist who specialized in clichés and well-worn metaphors. I took the page out and kept it folded up inside my diary. I’m looking at it now. What use I thought it would be I don’t know. True, it told me a lot of things about a young girl who had been born in Bradford of parents born in Varanasi, but nothing very personal and nothing about Jason at all. He was not to exist until the next installment.

Eleven years turn newsprint yellow and bring out the smell of printer’s ink. The blurred photograph, a much enlarged snap, shows Nelima with her parents, her three sisters, and her brother in a tiny, cramped, untended garden against a backdrop of chain-link fences and the rears of small terraced houses. The clear photograph is a glamour shot of a good-looking if heavy-cheeked young woman with satiny black hair, a pendant hanging over her forehead and a jewel stud in her nose. The headline reads: WHY DID I EVER GIVE UP MY SON?

“I hope I never have a child,” Silver said.

He was thinking of what people do to children. Give birth to them without thought or care, bandy them about, abandon them, transfer them, fight over them, above all, steal them. It took him a long time to get over knowing that it was Alison who had taken him away on his lost weekend. That morning, after we had read “Nelima’s Story,” he spent hours trying to re-create details of those days, believing as he did for a while that what she had told us would open windows in his memory. It didn’t. All it had established was what the nature of the boat was and what the birds were. Playing with Alison, eating the food she gave him, sleeping in a bed with the ship in a bottle beside him, none of that came back. There was no enlightenment.

“I wish she’d at least admit she did wrong,” he said.

“She doesn’t see it as wrong. She thinks a woman who wants a child is justified in anything she does to get one.”

“You don’t feel like that, do you?”

I said I hoped I’d have a child one day but not like Nelima did or as Alison was doing now, but in the natural course of things and with someone I loved. He looked at me abstractedly.

“Maybe with me?”

“You don’t want children.”