‘I did, with Jane. She did, with me. But the time was never right for both of us at once, so it never happened. I don’t regret it now because I think we’d have split anyway.’ Tactfully he considered what he was about to say, then said it regardless. ‘And so as far as the present goes, I teach enough kids from fractured families. And from non-existent families. I see what it’s like.’

‘Like Jack.’

He laughed. ‘Not much, no. On another scale, actually. On completely another planet from Jack. Some kids – not all the ones from problem backgrounds, of course, but some of them – are like a different species.’

‘I can hardly imagine.’ I already admired him for doing his difficult job; now I knew the colour of his voice a little better and the dryness of his understatements, I had a glimpse of just how difficult it might be. I remembered the tides of children I had seen pouring out of the school. They had been menacing enough.

‘I try to teach them Macbeth and creative writing, and the unfashionable difference between an adjective and an adverb, yes. Mostly it’s utterly pointless. They’re angry, some of them, and violent because of their anger, but it’s bred out of deprivation and neglect and brutality that you and Jack could hardly conceive of. So no, I don’t yearn too much for fatherhood. I fear the responsibility of it.’

He spoke simply, almost flatly. Another siren ululated in the middle distance. Then he added, ‘Very occasionally you do get through to one or two of them. One of them says, Yes, I see. Or, I liked that, sir. And you know they’ll remember whatever it was you were trying to convey to the rest of the mob, long after they’ve left school and gone to work. Maybe even until their dying day. That compensates for all the rest of the mindless argy-bargy that teaching’s about nowadays. It comes close to having one of your own, I’m pretty sure. There was a moment with Jack, in fact.’

‘Was there?’ I was startled.

‘I gave him a poem to read. About a bird.’

‘What was it?’

‘“The Windhover”.’

I’d never heard of it. In front of Paul I was slightly ashamed of the fact that, to me, books had always represented calf bindings and coloured endpapers, and tooled or carved designs in all their sumptuous variety and possibility, rather more than windows into an infinity of knowledge.