Once, standing among the coats in David Hunter’s bedroom, I found myself alone with one of his flying-club groupies, the young widow of an RAF sergeant killed in Cyprus. I guessed that he had assigned her the job of bringing me back to life. As David stood guard in the corridor and pretended to discuss the Mercury space flights with an aviation journalist, she leaned against the door and drew me onto her thighs. I held her small shoulders as if she were one of my daughters, frightened after a fall in the garden. I pressed my cheek to her mouth and felt her lips in my ear, teeth biting at the lobe. When I failed to respond she slipped her hand below the waist of my trousers, fingers probing between my buttocks. She tugged at my shirt and palpated me as she would have soothed a wounded lover. She waited patiently for my erection, but then gave up with a shrug, kissed me cheerfully on the forehead, and slipped through the door.

Had nature, through long trial and error, decided that I had failed as both husband and father and banished me before I could do any further damage? Certainly, many people thought that I should not be looking after the children. But Henry, Alice, and Lucy were all I had to believe in, and I was sure that I could make them happy. We cooked in the crowded kitchen, following the girls’ outlandish recipes, argued over television, and did our homework together. With longer memories of his mother, Henry was sometimes sad, and in the evenings I carried the TV set into my study and sat with him on the sofa, an arm around him while he quietly watched his favourite comedy programmes. One evening at last I heard him laugh.

Every day was an Aladdin’s Cave of schemes and enthusiasms. Alice and Lucy, seven and four, soon took charge of everything, deciding when we should go shopping or visit friends, whether I needed a rest from them or if it was time to hold a party. Already they were sizing up the mothers of their school friends, urging me into little flirtations and blithely waving aside the minor problem of their husbands. I collected them from school in the afternoons and felt a thrill of relief when they clambered noisily into the car, as if we had been separated for months.