I arrived to pick him up on Sunday morning, and he was all dressed and ready in his green anorak, with a blue scarf round his neck and a notebook in his hand: there was an air of anticipation about him. I kissed Eve goodbye, and she waved us off at the door. Anyone watching us might even have thought we were a family.

It’s daunting, taking someone else’s child out for the day. You’re worried that you might do something slightly wrong and set them off into a screaming tantrum or a sulk, and then have to hand them back to their mother, surly or weeping, with the defeated admission hanging in the air that, as things turned out, they didn’t like you very much and (although you won’t actually say this, of course) you didn’t like them at all.

Raymond wasn’t like that. He was easy company, if that is the right way to put it. It was as though there was something already old in his understanding of how life went. With circumstances being what they were, and Eve having to work, no one ever really had quite enough time for him, although Eve and her mother did their best. But instead of becoming a pain in the neck and clamouring for more attention, the way most children did (the ones you always see in the supermarket being casually smacked to the staccato tune of ‘Shu-dd-up, Luc-as’ or ‘Put-it-back, Ti-na’) he had absorbed the fact that attention was somehow rationed, and that you just made the most of it when it finally came round. The rest of the time he locked himself in a dream-world with his books or his toys. He must have decided that the trip to the zoo was a good thing, therefore he wasn’t going to wreck it. Like Eve, he seemed to know that happiness was not a right. I appreciated this, and it made me sad.

A child’s tantrum carries a kind of confidence, after all, the belief that everyone will love them no matter how badly they behave, that they’ll be calmed down and carried home without conditions. Raymond should have been too young to know that love is a breakable commodity, but he sensed it anyway and it made him careful.