‘I understand perfectly. Let us say until the 26th?’

‘It is noted. Thank you. You will dine in the hotel tonight?’

‘That is so, Madame.’

The postcard was of Milton’s Cottage – from the children. They were both having a lovely time. Hoped I was well. There was a scribbled line from Helen. Sleeping and eating. Utter bliss. No love. Just signed ‘H’.

There was no reason to suppose that she would have sent love. She had made it perfectly clear that she had none to offer. So why, sitting in my really fairly wretched, if perfectly adequate, little room, did I suddenly feel the need of comforting? Why did I feel a very small pinch – not a stab, that would be far too strong a word – but a pinch of regret?

The evening light waned in the sky. Small clouds, a swoop of starlings, the napkins on the line below in the garden flapping in a breeze I could neither feel nor hear. It was rather as if I was being ‘kept in’ after school. A perfectly ridiculous feeling of being, as it were, penalized for some misdemeanour. Alone in the classroom. Five hundred lines to write in copperplate. A chunk of Wordsworth. Adding and subtracting, long division, LCD. School stuff. I hadn’t felt like it before. Irrational.

Perhaps it came about because we had been talking of family, blood, marriage, fragments, time lost and, it would seem, little gained. A lonely sensation. And then this postcard. ‘Having a lovely time with Gran.’ ‘Utter bliss!’ No one needed me.

I lay on the Napoleon bed, hands behind my head, staring at the kittens and goldfish.

Just remember: the kids had sent you that card. Not the other way round. I hadn’t sent a thought their way. They were my responsibility just as much as they were Helen’s. Only, it would appear, that she loved them rather more than I did. Well, give or take a friendly cuff, an absent-minded goodnight kiss, I’d never shown them any form of paternal love, never been what you might call a ball of fire on the holidays we had. I mean, I didn’t go in for the sand-castle bit, or exploring walks in woods or over rocks. I don’t remember that I ever even took them shrimping, or to sail a boat, or to look for crabs in rockpools.

James had once been part of a family which went looking for crabs in rockpools.

There was a photograph to prove it.

I couldn’t really think exactly where I had gone wrong, or why. Just that I had. And that today, and the day before today, had rather cleared off the varnish, so to speak. I suddenly saw the real portrait of me under the layers of dusty indifference. I did care, of course I did, but in an abstract way. One had children, the mother brought them up and that was that. I had thought.