Sometimes one hears or witnesses a thing so shocking that the brain cannot programme it for a second. I remember I was once in an earthquake in South America, and as I watched the ornaments and books jump and leap about, it took a second or two before my brain would tell me what was happening. This was just such a moment. Joanna Langley, enchanting, ravishing Joanna, was dead and in a way more suited to the forgotten, the abandoned and the lost; not to a darling of the gods.

‘Christ.’ For one tiny instant I thought I was going to burst into tears and when I looked over at Kieran it seemed that he might too, but then he recovered. At last he nodded slowly, as if my exclamation had been a comment. The fact is there are some deaths that have a gentle aspect, that bring a kind of comfort of their own to help the survivors bear their grief. This was not one of them. ‘When did it happen?’

‘October 1985. The fifteenth. We’d split up a couple of years before, as you probably know, and we didn’t speak for a bit, except about Malcolm, because we were having…’ he hesitated. What were they having? ‘An argument. A disagreement.’ He was gathering momentum. ‘A fight. But then we got the judgement, which was at least a decision, and I felt we could move on, that we were both getting through it.’ He gave a gesture of hopelessness with his hands.

‘But you weren’t.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘What was the disagreement about?’ Again, on paper this seems intrusive, but we had, as they say now, ‘bonded’ during the evening, or I felt we had, and it didn’t seem to be prying when I said it.

‘Joanna was having a lot of problems. Well,’ he ran his fingers through his enviable hair, ‘you can tell that from the way she died. And I wanted to be Malcolm’s principal carer. I don’t mean I didn’t want her to see him, or anything like that.’ It was clear that guilt for his first wife’s death coursed through his veins so hotly he could still feel it twenty-three years later. ‘I just thought he would be better off living with me, rather than trailing round after his mother. I had more money than she did by then-’

‘Jeepers.’

He shook his head. ‘Alfred went down in a property crash a few years earlier, so there was nothing much left in that quarter. Their whole life had changed from when you knew them. They were really quite broke, living in a flat on the edge of Streatham.’ I had a sudden, vivid vision of Mrs Langley, sparkling with gems and watching from the edge of a ballroom like a shifty ferret to spy any interest in her daughter from Viscount Summersby. I never liked her much but I was sorry all the same. At that time nobody would have imagined the future waiting for her. ‘It wasn’t only the money. Joanna was very disappointed in the way the world had turned out. She thought by then we’d all be living in some kind of spiritual Nepal, smoking dope and mouthing the lyrics from Hair. Not taking out pensions in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.’

‘A lot of our generation thought that. Some of them are in government.’

But I couldn’t staunch the flow. Kieran had to tell his story. As the television quiz show has it: He’d started, so he’d finish. ‘And of course, looking at it from her point of view I was at the peak of my madness, screaming if there was a crease on my collar, sacking staff because the knives and forks weren’t tidy enough in the kitchen drawer… None of that side of it was her fault.’ His effort to be fair to his late wife was more than commendable, it was heartbreaking. He sighed again. ‘Anyway, we fought about the boy like a couple of cats. She said I’d poison his mind and make him a fascist. I said she’d poison his body and make him an addict. On and on we went, tearing at each other’s throats. Until finally she dropped the bombshell. We were having breakfast one morning in that weird, angry way of two people who are still living together but know they won’t be for long. We were sitting there in silence, until she looked up, preparing to speak. I knew some insult was on its way, so I deliberately made no enquiries. After a bit she got bored and just said it.’

‘What?’

‘That Malcolm wasn’t my son.’

‘How did she say it?’

‘Like that. “Malcolm isn’t your son.”’

He stopped now to let the words sink in. So was this where my quest was to end? It felt strange to have reached my destination, and yet also satisfactory in a way that Joanna’s death should be partially redeemed by the boy’s father at last acknowledging his blood child. Even if there was an anticlimactic element in the thought of Damian’s fortune going to the only family in England who wouldn’t notice it.

Kieran hadn’t finished. ‘You mentioned the house party in Portugal.’

‘Yes.’ I knew Portugal would come into it.

‘She said she’d met up with “the boy’s father” there and that she’d slept with him when we were back in London. That night, in fact. As soon as we got home from the airport we had a row about why we’d gone at all and she walked out…’ He shrugged. ‘It was obvious she was talking about Damian.’ He must have caught and mistaken my response to this news, and hurried to undo any possible hurt. ‘She was always very fond of you, but…’ How was he to phrase it?

I helped him out. ‘She wasn’t interested in me.’

We both knew she wasn’t, so why should he argue? ‘Not like that,’ he said, accepting my own verdict. ‘And Joanna couldn’t have cared less about the Tremaynes. It had to be Damian.’ He paused. However often he went over this territory, it obviously still hurt. ‘So I sat there, with a piece of toast in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, while she blew my life out of the water. And I minded when she told me. I minded very much.’

‘Of course you did.’

‘It wasn’t just the boy. She was unravelling our life. This was retroactive legislation. We’d only been married a year at the time she was talking about and I’d thought we were happy, then. I’d been against the damn holiday anyway, because I dreaded her being pulled back into a crowd that I didn’t believe was any good for her.’

‘But you went because her mother made you. And when you got back she slept with Damian.’ At least I now understood his visceral dislike.

‘That’s about it. And by this stage of the battle she was glad to talk about it, because it was going to save her son from the vile Leona Helmsley world of mad indulgence that I was living in. She thought it would settle matters. That I would give up and back off, and Malcolm would go with her, and I would be left alone to count my money and weep.’

‘But that didn’t happen.’

‘Of course not. My name was on the birth certificate for God’s sake. I was married to her when he was conceived, never mind born. I loved him. He was my son.’ He almost shouted this assertion, back in the grip of the row, but seeing my startled face he recovered, repeating the words in a gentler tone, which touched me as it would have touched anyone who heard him. ‘I loved him. He was my son. I could have made my claim on that basis alone.’ I sat up. I’d assumed he had made his claim on that basis alone, if he’d kept in contact with the boy. Which, from the way he was talking, he obviously had.

‘But you didn’t?’

He shook his head. ‘I had a paternity test done. I wanted to know how tough the battle was going to be.’ He looked at me again quite fiercely, and for a moment I rather sympathised with Joanna when I saw what she’d taken on. I suppose nobody can be as successful as Kieran had been without having some steel in them somewhere. ‘When the results came back they showed Malcolm was mine after all.’

All my sense of matters being resolved deserted me on the instant. ‘How did she take it?’

‘How do you think?’ He rolled his eyes at me. ‘She wasn’t thinking straight by then. She said she didn’t believe me. It was exactly the kind of thing I would fix, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine.’ I could. ‘So we ran another test under her team’s supervision and obviously the result was the same again, and by then she was coming apart at the seams…’ He was standing, staring out of one of the windows, silhouetted against a dark-blue velvet sky studded with stars. He continued talking, facing on to the night, hardly aware I was there. ‘As you might expect, she hadn’t helped her case as a rational woman with all this screaming carry-on, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when the judge gave me full custody, with visiting rights for her, which was much more than I’d asked for. We got the decision in September eighty-five.’