“Oh, my darling Jamal, it’s been so long, kiss me and kiss me again.”

“Better keep your hands on the wheel, Karen.”

“I can drive one-handed. You know there’s a lot I can do one-handed.”

I said, “I didn’t know you were coming to George’s this weekend.”

“You didn’t? But I haven’t been out for absolutely ages.”

“You’ve been hiding at home?”

She said, “Things haven’t been good. They’ve been bloody rotten and down on me. Can’t we stop for a drink?”

“No.”

“Just a little one in a country pub?”

“It’s a different decade now, I’m afraid.”

“Haven’t we become too sensible?”

“The world has, but I’m sure you haven’t. It’s terrific to see you, Karen.”

“Is it? Is it really, Jamal?”

Karen was driving me to Mustaq’s.

Miriam had become determined to live her own life, even though she still felt guilty about leaving the kids and the house. Nonetheless, she and Henry were looking for the opportunity to get away together. As there was a club they were reluctant to miss on Friday night, they would come to the country after lunch on Saturday morning. I could have waited for them or gone down on the train.

It was a surprise then, when my old girlfriend Karen Pearl, the “TV Bitch,” offered me a lift. I wasn’t aware that she knew Mustaq, but it turned out that over the years he had appeared several times on her TV shows. Now and again she went to his house to recuperate from her life.

She turned up outside my place in a tiny red car, which roared when she pressed the accelerator. She’d asked her husband to buy it as compensation for leaving her, which he considered a more than fair exchange. If I was already anxious about seeing Mustaq and answering his inevitable questions, being squashed in a small space with Karen while being hurled down the motorway certainly made me breathe more rapidly.

“I am delighted and totally chuffed to be getting away,” she said. “You?”

I felt unnaturally close to the road; Karen played loud music, mostly ABBA, and, for my benefit, Gladys Knight as well as the Supremes, while smoking the entire time, as we always used to. Twice she opened the roof to demonstrate how it worked.

“Groovy top.”

“Isn’t it? We’re so old now, Jamal. My two girls are growing up,” she said. “It’s all slammed doors and lost mobile phones. But we have a grand girly time—like being back at boarding school. Otherwise, contrary to your corrupt view of me, I don’t have much of a laugh these days. Tom”—her ex-husband—“has taken the girls, along with his more or less teenage girlfriend, to Disneyland, Paris. As they are all of the same mental age, they’ll have a great time.”

“You having anyone?”

“I’m an untouchable,” she said. “This will make you laugh—I know exactly the kind of thing which will appeal to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, a few weeks ago I thought I’d give myself a treat. I tried it on with a potential toy boy. I’d heard that’s what all the old girls were doing. I strong-armed this moody, well-built kid into a ruinously expensive hotel room. There was champagne, drugs and what you used to describe as my vast arse, in silk red panties, all ready. And the boy so fit and sweet—”

“Famous?”

“On his way there. At the moment, an extra—a speaking extra, mind, but words rather than sentences—from a soap opera. At some cost to the little dignity I have left, I removed a good deal of my clothing, presenting said panties in what I considered to be a provocative way.”

“Oh wow.”

“He sat on the edge of the bed holding my hand, looking, I think, at how withered it was. Either that or my nail varnish had hypnotised him. Within half an hour he was on the tube home. I sat there for a while crying—”

“Oh, Karen—”

“Ready for my overdose, Mr. DeMille. Then I went home and got into bed with the girls. Oh, Jamal, think of all the nights you and I wasted not making love.”

“There were many,” I said. “But I enjoyed every one of them with you.”

“You’ve got sweeter in your old age, Jamal. It’s nice to talk to you again. Why do you never call me now? Oh, forget it, I’m going to think positive today. Isn’t that what you psychologists tell us?”

“No.”

“What do you tell us, then?” After a while she said. “Henry’s coming down, isn’t he? Will you put in a word for me?”

“You fancy Henry now? You two can’t spend ten minutes together without falling out.”

“Darling, haven’t you known desperation? He’s a man, isn’t he? At least below the waist, and he’s free.”

“He just got occupied,” I said.

“Who grabbed the old fox?”

“My sister.”

“Isn’t he trying to put her in the documentary?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking artists with their spontaneous ideas, I hate them. Remind me to kill him when I see him.” She said, “Is your sister going to be around this weekend?”

“On Saturday.”

“They in love?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think he’d last long on the open market. That’s my hope accounted for, then. You still single?”

“There’s nothing doing. These days there’s rarely a twitch.”

She turned and looked down at my crotch. “Yeah, right.”

I said, “The idea of all that seems very far away from me. Josephine was hard work. Sometimes I think I miss being in love, or being loved. A little passion now and again would be a thrill.”

“You’re too objective about love. You can see through it. I was thinking…you said this thing to me once. That you hated to fall in love, it was like being sucked down the plughole. You lost control, it was madness.”

“Did I say that?”

“Did you feel that about Josephine?”

“Sucked into some elemental state of need, overidealising the other, drifting in illusion and then one day waking up and wondering how you got there? Yes…But—”

I didn’t want to say it to her for fear of upsetting myself, but I had liked being in a family, liked having Rafi and Josephine around me, hearing their voices in the house, their shoes all over the hall.

I had met Josephine at a lecture I was giving, “How to Forget.” She was a psychology student but was bored by the “rats on drugs” approach. We had only been together for a few months when she fell pregnant. My father had died about eighteen months before, and I was keen to replace him with another father: myself. I was living in the flat where I saw patients, and beginning to make a decent living.

Josephine had her own place, which her mother had left her, and we bought a small house near what became my office. We hadn’t been together long when I lost her almost immediately to another man, my son. Or, rather, we lost each other to him, and neither of us bothered to come back. Of course, many relationships require a “third object” to work: a child, house, cat; some sort of shared project. He was that, but also the wedge. Josephine knew how to be a mother; being a woman was far more difficult. She waited a long time before trying to find out what that might mean.

When he was little, I kissed Rafi continuously, licked his stomach, stuck my tongue in his ear, tickled him, squeezed him until he gasped, laughing at his beard of saliva, his bib looking like an Elizabethan ruff. I loved the intimacy: the boy’s wet mouth, the smell of his hair, as I’d loved that of various women. “Toys,” he called his mother’s breasts. “What is thinking?” he’d ask. “Why do people have noses?”

Around the age of six, Rafi would wake up early, as I tended to, while Josephine slept. I’d sit at the table downstairs, making notes on my patients, or I’d prepare a paper or lecture I was giving. He brought me his best pens to borrow, to help make my writing “neater,” as he put it. He’d sit with me—indeed, often, on me; or on the table—listening to music on my CD player, through headphones bigger than his cheeks. He liked Handel, and when he got excited he said, “Daddy, I feel as if I’ve got people dancing in my tummy.”

We bought identical green coats from Gap, with fur-lined hoods, which we wore with sunglasses and trainers. Big Me and Pigmy, I’d call us, thinking we looked great. When he was smaller, I’d walk fast for miles across London, with him in his pushchair, stopping off at coffee shops to feed and change him. It’s easy to speak to women if you have a baby with you. It was like being the companion of a celebrity. Strangers greeted him; people constantly gave and bought him things; women fed him, talked to him. He disappeared into their midst like a rugby ball into a scrum, and returned reeking of numerous perfumes, his hair standing up and his eyes staring, his face covered in biscuit.

I liked playing Monopoly, and having paint, toys, videos and footballs over the floor; I liked eating fish-finger sandwiches, and the kid sneaking into our bed at night because he “didn’t have anyone to talk to,” drinking hot chocolate in his bottle, stopping only to say, “I want to kiss you lots of times.” I liked him holding on to my ear as he went to sleep; even liked the cat patting my face with his paw while I was napping. I liked reading to him in the bath, as he sat there talking to numerous plastic men attached by pegs to the washing line above his head.

Rafi was a desire machine, his favourite hobby being shopping. At school, when asked to name his favourite book, he chose the Argos catalogue, which he would pore over, ticking everything he wanted. Fortunately, like him, I enjoyed anything to do with Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Power Rangers and the Lion King. I liked kicking a football around with him in the street, and hearing him play Beethoven’s Ninth on the harmonica. I liked arm wrestling, chasing and fighting with him, and holding him upside down by the ankles, sometimes over the toilet. We liked, among many other things, jokes, swearing and hitting women on the arse.

We would spend whole weekends hanging around, eating pizza, swimming at Acton baths, kicking a ball to one another, watching Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies; the sorts of days when, in the evening, if you asked yourself, did anything happen to me today?—and I did keep a diary of this sort at one time—the only answer could be no, nothing. Except we were enjoying one another’s company, and no one could ask here, where is the meaning?

When it ended, and I had to go—I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do—the loss seemed immeasurable; but all I could do was carry on living, as best as I could, seeing him every day, wondering what I’d missed of him. “Are you another boy’s daddy now?” he asked.

“I won’t pity you,” Karen said, as we sped to Mustaq’s. “Tempting though it is. The chances are that a man as successful and well connected as you will find someone—and someone young too. But I will not. Maybe we should get back together—just for a bit?” All I could do was laugh. “I’m sure you don’t tell your patients you were a pornmonger. I know your secrets, and I still love you a little, you know,” she said. “When we were together, I felt all the time that you were too smashed up over Ajita to notice me much.”

“I’m always all smashed up over someone.”

“But you cared for me some, didn’t you, although I was awful and stupid?”

She leant across and kissed me, brushing my crotch with the back of her hand.

“Oh God yes,” I said, sentimentally. “Jesus, I’ve always loved you more than a little bit, Karen.”

“I always felt that you were just passing the time. You know, you’re afraid of letting anyone near you. You want them, and then you disappear.”

She started to cry, which she did easily. She’d taken off her heels and was driving barefoot, her skirt riding up around her thighs. In her twenties she’d been sexy, but even then her weight went up and down and she called herself “the potato.” Whatever size she was, she knew I still found her attractive; it was the familiarity, but not only that.

“It’s not too late, Jamal. Can’t we do it properly?”

I kissed her again, pressing my tongue against hers. Beyond the cigarettes, alcohol and perfume, I could smell someone I knew and liked a lot.