And then sleep took me.

SUNDAY

20

The Stratford was half pub and half split-level soft play area with slides, ball pools and crash mats, red-faced parents trying to follow their offspring across rope bridges, squeezing through obstacles they were too big for, ignoring the smell of sweaty socks and disinfectant. William loved it. I had spent twenty minutes in there with him as he charged around, but now we’d come out and I nursed a pint of Guinness as we waited for our food to arrive. He was busy with a box of crayons, colouring the sky orange on his paper place mat. Mel had posted about lunch at the pub on Facebook and her phone pinged periodically with comments from friends.

Our friends Adam and Kate had the table next to ours. Their twin five-year-old girls, Phoebe and Sophie, had both come today as the same character from Frozen – in blue and white sparkly dresses and tiaras. Right now, though, their table was empty. Adam was in the soft play jungle with their girls – his pint of lager abandoned, untouched on its coaster – and Kate was outside making a phone call.

There wasn’t a good way to introduce the subject, so I just came out with it.

‘You know Thursday night,’ I said to Mel, lowering my voice, ‘when you met Ben?’

‘Yes.’ She was looking at the puddings on the menu. ‘What about it?’

‘I just felt really stupid about it. I shouldn’t even have been there. It was really weird, seeing you and Ben. And then when you denied it later, denied meeting him, it felt like . . .’

‘Like what?’

Just say it.

‘Like the worst day of my life. Like everything good was suddenly coming to an end, everything good about my life.’

‘Because you thought we were having some kind of secret rendezvous?’

‘Talk about jumping to conclusions . . . I added two and two together, and made seventeen.’

She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, blushing.

‘I’ll allow it, considering what happened at that wedding reception.’

‘That wasn’t really your fault, could’ve happened to anyone.’

‘Daddy?’ William said.

‘Hang on, Wills.’

She wouldn’t look at me.

‘Not you,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have done something like that.’

‘Daddy?’ William said again. He was staring out of the pub window.

‘What’s up, big man?’

‘Look. That man’s smoking.’

Out in the car park was a hugely bearded homeless man sitting on the low wall, surrounded by plastic bags full of his possessions, puffing hungrily on the nub of a cigarette burned almost down to the filter.

‘Yes he is, Wills.’

‘Smoking makes you die, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Look,’ he said, his nose almost against the glass. ‘He’ll be dead in a minute.’

Mel and I exchanged a smile. Our son dealt in absolutes, in the here and now. He lived in the moment. Smoking was bad and it killed you – which meant it killed you right away.