‘How else could you look at it?’

‘Ha. I see what you mean,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he had just that second worked out that there was only one way of looking at it.

‘Did you ever live with Marcus’s mother?’

‘Define "live with".’

‘Did you ever have a spare pair of socks at her house? Or a toothbrush?’

Say that Fiona had given him a pair of socks for Christmas. And say that he had left them at her house, and hadn’t got around to picking them up yet. Then he could point out, with a clear conscience, that not only had he once kept a spare pair of socks at Fiona’s house, but they were still there! Unfortunately, however, she hadn’t given him socks, she had given him that stupid book. And he hadn’t even left the book there anyway. So the dream sock scenario was just that—a dream.

‘No.’

‘Just… no?’

‘Yes.’

He picked up the last little spring roll, dunked it in the chilli sauce, put it in his mouth, and behaved as though it were way too big, so he wouldn’t be able to speak for several minutes. Rachel would have to do the talking, and she would probably want to talk about something else eventually. He wanted her to tell him about the book she was currently illustrating, or her ambition to exhibit her work, or how much she had been looking forward to seeing him. Those were the kinds of conversations he had envisaged; he was fed up with talking about imaginary children, and even more fed up with talking about why he had imagined them in the first place.

But Rachel simply sat there and waited for him to finish his mouthful, and however much he chewed and grimaced and swallowed and choked he couldn’t make a mini spring roll last forever. So he told her the truth, as he knew he would, and she was appalled, as she had every right to be.

‘I never actually said he was my son. The words "I have a son called Marcus" never passed my lips. That’s what you chose to believe.’

‘Yeah, right. It’s me who’s the fantasist. I wanted to believe you had a son, so I let my imagination run riot.’

‘You know, that’s a very interesting theory. I read this thing in the paper once about this guy who’d taken all these middle-aged women for a ride, cleaned them out of their life savings because they were convinced he was rich. And, the thing was, he didn’t even have to do anything to prove it. They just believed him.’

‘So he told them he was rich. He lied. That’s different.’

‘Ah. Yes. I see what you mean. That’s sort of where the comparison breaks down, doesn’t it?’

‘Because you didn’t lie. I just made it up. I thought, Cute guy, if only he had a kid, a geeky son, pre-teenage if possible, and then you turned up at my house with Marcus, and bingo! I made this crazy link because of some deep psychological need in me.’

It wasn’t turning out as badly as Will feared it might. She was definitely seeing some kind of funny side, even though she clearly thought he was a weirdo.

‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Could have happened to anyone.’

‘Hey, don’t push your luck. If I want to be amused and tolerant, that’s my business. I’m not yet at a stage where you can make jokes too.’

‘Sorry.’

‘But where does Marcus come in? I mean, you obviously hadn’t hired him for the afternoon. There’s some kind of relationship there.’

She was right, of course, and he rescued a potentially disastrous evening by telling her everything there was to tell. Nearly everything, anyway: he didn’t tell her the reason he had come across Marcus in the first place was because he had joined SPAT. He didn’t tell her that because he thought it might sound bad coming on top of a similar revelation. He didn’t want her to think he had a problem.

Rachel invited him back for coffee after the meal, but Will knew that sex wasn’t in the air. Or rather, there was a little, the merest whiff, but it was emanating from him, so it didn’t count. He found Rachel so attractive that there would always be sex in the air when he was with her. All that seemed to be coming from her was a quiet amusement and a sort of baffled tolerance, and though he was grateful for these small mercies, they were very rarely, he would imagine, precursors to any kind of physical intimacy beyond a quick hair-ruffle.

Rachel made coffee in great big blue designer cups and they sat opposite each other, Rachel spread out on the sofa, Will bolt upright in an old armchair covered with some kind of Asian throw.

‘Why did you think Marcus would make you more interesting?’ she asked him after they had poured and stirred and blown and done everything else they could think of doing to a cup of coffee.

‘Was I more interesting?’

‘Yes, I suppose you were.’

‘Why?’

‘Because… You really want to know the truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because I thought you were a sort of blank—you didn’t do anything, you weren’t passionate about anything, you didn’t seem to have much to say—and then when you said you had a kid—’

‘I didn’t actually say—’

‘Yeah, whatever… I thought, I’ve got this guy all wrong.’

‘So there you are then. You’ve answered your own question.’

‘But I had got you wrong.’

‘How d’you work that out?’

‘Because there is something there. You didn’t make it all up about Marcus. You’re involved, and you care, and you understand him, and you worry about him… So you’re not the guy I thought you were before you brought him up.’

Will knew this was supposed to make him feel better about everything, but it didn’t. For a start, he’d only known Marcus for a few months, so Rachel had raised some interesting questions about the thirty-six years he had let slip through his fingers. And he didn’t want to be defined by Marcus. He wanted his own life, and his own identity; he wanted to be interesting in his own right. Where had he heard that complaint before? At SPAT, that’s where. He had somehow managed to turn himself into a single parent without even going to the trouble of fathering a child.

There was hardly any point in moaning though. It was too late for that; he had chosen to ignore his own advice, advice that had served him well for his entire adult life. The way Will saw it, the reason that some of the people at SPAT were in a state wasn’t because they had kids—their problems had started earlier than that, when they first fell for someone and made themselves vulnerable. Now Will had done the same and, as far as he was concerned, he deserved all he got. He’d be singing with his eyes closed soon, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Twenty-nine

For three or four weeks—it couldn’t have been any longer than that, but later on, when Marcus looked back on that time, it seemed like months, or years—nothing happened. He saw Will, he saw Ellie (and Zoe) at school, Will bought him some new glasses and took him to have his hair cut, he discovered through Will a couple of singers he liked who weren’t Joni Mitchell or Bob Marley, singers that Ellie had heard of and didn’t hate. It felt as though he were changing, in his own body and in his head, and then his mum started the crying thing again.

Just like before, there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. and just like before, it began slowly, with the odd snuffle after dinner, which one night turned into a long, frightening burst of sobbing, a burst that Marcus could do nothing about, no matter how many questions he asked or hugs he gave her; and then, finally, there was the breakfast crying again, and he knew for sure that things were serious and they were in trouble.

But one thing had changed. Back in the first breakfast crying time, hundreds of years ago, he was on his own; now, there were loads of people. He had Will, he had Ellie, he had… Anyway, he had two people, two friends, and that was some kind of improvement on before. He could just go up to either of them and say, ‘My mum’s at it again,’ and they’d know what he meant, and they’d be able to say something that might make some kind of sense.