Edith had loved the boy. Loved him with all her heart and soul, thinking in her ignorance that her mother would allow her to keep him because adoption had never been mentioned. Believing in her heart of hearts that Nancy would soften towards her and the child once it arrived and made a niche in her heart. But it was not to be. When the boy was two months old they had come to take him away. A big woman from an adoption agency, with hard steely blue eyes and cherries in her hat, and a smaller woman, kinder, with watery eyes and a big grey folder. Edith had screamed, pleaded and begged on her knees but her mother would not relent. She had enjoyed it.

In the end, the big woman with the cherries in her hat had dragged the now screaming child from his mother’s arms, pulling poor Edith along with her for a few steps until she had dropped sobbing on to the linoleum. Then it was all over. Edith’s son was gone from the house and from her life. And she had been left bereft, broken-hearted. The next day George had seen his mother forcing her to drink a cup of cold tea full of Epsom salts to help her get rid of the milk in her breasts. He had finally hated Nancy on that day. When Edith had met Joss Campbell a few years later he had been so glad for her, because Joss was older than Edith and was more than a match for Nancy. When his mother had told him, as she always told any man interested in Edith, about the bastard child, he had just smiled. Smiled and said he would have her under any circumstances. George had loved Joss for that one sentence alone.

Yes, he would go and see Edith. Even if it took every penny of his redundancy money. He was fifty-one now and Edith fifty-five. Life was drawing on, and he wanted to see her before it was too late.

He drank his now cold coffee and was grateful for the whisky that Elaine had put in it.

Somewhere in the world was a man, a thirty-eight-year-old man, who was probably married with children of his own. Who, because of his grandmother’s warped mind, would never know the kind and gentle woman who had borne him.

George washed up his cup and saucer carefully and placed them in the plastic drainer. Then he joined Elaine to watch the film. But thoughts of Edith stayed with him all that evening.