Later, we got up and padded around in his kitchen. It was oppressively hot outside, I could tell from the slow shuffle of a woman crossing the street with a bag of shopping and the drooping branches of the plane tree opposite. Paul had given me a clean T-shirt to wear and I sat on a stool watching him make coffee and toast. The details of someone else’s kitchen – the layout of cupboards, the design of mugs and location of the coffee jar – were all interesting, clean-edged, like on the first morning of a holiday. He gave me the choice of honey or Marmite, then put the coffee pot on the table between us. ‘How’s Jack? Is he at his dad’s this weekend?’ he asked.

‘Um, no.’ I told him what was happening.

I remembered the first time I talked properly to him, in his room at school after I’d found out about Jack’s truancy. I had liked the attentive but undemonstrative way he listened then, and he was still listening to me now. He didn’t try to propose solutions or tell me that everything would be all right, or that I was worrying too much or not enough. He just gave me his full attention.

‘I wanted to tell you about it. My good friends came round the other evening and we had a conference. They were very supportive and I was grateful, but I was thinking that you were the person I really wanted to talk to.’

‘Because I was his head of year?’

‘No. Because you’re you.’

‘Really?’

There was a hesitancy about him and a reluctance to take anything for granted. At some point he had drawn back his antennae and retreated into himself, maybe after his long relationship had ended. He was waiting and watching, perhaps, but without much expectation. I recognised the remains of damage in him and it touched me. And it also struck me that I didn’t want to be toting the remains of mine around any longer, any more than I wanted to be Paul’s aide in shouldering or smothering his. That was the past and we were free of it. We had the luxury of choice and I knew that to choose was to be whole.

I touched his hand across the table top. It was an ordinary morning, a baking August Saturday in the inner city, but something out of the ordinary was happening. ‘Yes. Tell me something, Paul.’ It seemed to be the first time I had used his name. ‘Didn’t you want children of your own? Don’t you still want them now?’