Ever sat in the car and reflected with the warmth of wanting to love his wife.

Clarissa.

That was her name, he had allowed it to come into his brain for the first time. He had written her off. He had always felt that her decision to have a child with another man, with Adam the violinist, was an act of abandonment, and, he supposed, cruelty. But she had taken him through his breakdown, helped him, and what if, through his developing sexual incapacity, she had decided to have the child with another man and was never going to tell him and they would have grown up as a happy family unit? What if it was done with love, out of love?

He had driven her away, she had never offered to leave, she was happy to remain, she just had at times found his behaviour intolerable, but then if he was insane, imbalanced, whatever they wanted to classify it as, and as far as she or anybody else knew, that was going to be it, forever, maybe she understandably wanted a child, and maybe this was her way of showering them with a love.

As the thoughts were formulating in a brain operating at a low level of intensity that would have been on a control button at a point on the scale of two out of ten, even he was aware that there were a lot of what ifs, and buts, and suppositions. A family who had never got close to this perception of love in their relationship, and he had just reacted in a primal way. A first base reaction. Aware that she could have been steps ahead, what if, in another way, she had got it all sussed, what if she wanted him still, with Jacob?

Was it him who was incapable of realising it, of sensing the love between them? Had he got it so very upside down and back to front?

A man who had misunderstood a situation.

Rare.

But would she return to the man who had given her the child? All his loving, his kindness seemed to disappear out of the window that he now wound down for air. Cracked, to allow the stream of hot evening air, full of toxic fumes as a million cars travelled home from where they’d come eight hours earlier, to fill his lungs and oxygenate his brain.

His poor brain.

He sometimes felt so sorry for his brain and wondered if he was responsible for it all going wrong or whether it was a progression of the predisposed genetic condition that could’ve been inherited, now that he was focusing, from either side of the family.