‘Well, as he’s still the size of a peanut,’ said Angela, ‘he hasn’t yet made any such preferences known. So, let’s not overcomplicate matters.’

‘But you take my point,’ said George, summoning a waiter over and ordering an Old Fashioned on the rocks with two twists of citrus rind rather than the traditional one. ‘Now that you’ve told me, I’m obliged to react in some way, even if that reaction is to do nothing at all. If I choose not to be involved, then I’m still involved by the nature of not being involved. Do you follow?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And then there’s the financial aspect.’

‘Now that’s beneath you,’ she said. ‘If you think I’m after your money—’

‘I don’t think that at all,’ he replied. ‘But you’d be entitled to some. And so would the child. Obviously, I wouldn’t shirk from paying my fair share. I wouldn’t want him to suffer any deprivations as a consequence of his bastardry.’

‘You know, for such a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, you use some very archaic terms. It’s rather de trop, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘These are legal terms, nothing more.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Angela.

‘And I couldn’t keep something like that from Beverley. She goes through our bank statements every month with all the urgency of a sniffer dog at international arrivals, just after the planes from Thailand have got in.’

‘George!’ she said, laughing a little. That grating laugh.

‘Well, it’s true. A few weeks ago, we got into a ferocious argument about why I’d spent thirty pounds in Simpson’s of Piccadilly when we have an account at Hatchards.’

‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ replied Angela, taking a sip of her water. ‘Since Simpson’s closed its door in the mid-nineties.’

‘You know what I mean,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Waterstone’s, then. With an apostrophe, I might add. It offends me that a book chain, of all places, cannot punctuate correctly.’

‘Speaking of which,’ said Angela, nodding at the canvas bag resting on the table between them, a large W emblazoned across the front. ‘You’ve been back, I see. What did you buy?’

‘A new biography that interested me,’ he said, passing the book across. ‘Eight hundred pages long. When was the last time you read an eight-hundred-page book? I never seem to read any more,’ he added. ‘I’m always on my laptop or my phone. Anyway, my point is that if I suddenly start transferring huge wodges of cash from my bank account to yours every month, Beverley’s going to ask why. And if she finds out that I’ve fathered a love child, she will almost certainly divorce me.’

‘And would that be the worst thing in the world?’ asked Angela.

‘It would, yes. I love my wife.’

‘Then why did you cheat on her?’