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‘No it was not! Don’t you see?’ She was angry now, holding on to both my arms and forcing me to face her. ‘It was not a mistake! That’s the whole point. It was not! I have never thought that it was a mistake, never ever, and I have never regretted it since and I never will. Meeting you and marrying you, that was by far the best thing I ever did. You rescued me, and more than once, because when Jane died I wanted to die too, and the only reason I didn’t was because you were there. You. You are a wonderful man, Douglas, you are, and you have no idea how much I love you and loved being married to you. You made me laugh and taught me things and you made me happy, and now you’ll be my wonderful, brilliant ex-husband. We have a wonderful son who is exactly as maddening and absurd as an eighteen-year-old boy should be, and he’s our son, ours, mine and yours now. And the fact that you and I didn’t last forever, well, you have to stop thinking of that as failure or defeat. It feels awful now, I know, but this is not the end of your world, Douglas. It is not. It is not.’

Well, it was all very emotional, more emotional than a public conversation should be in my opinion, so we stepped into a bar and spent the afternoon there, laughing and crying in turn. Much, much later we parted, friends again, and exchanged various affectionate texts on the journey back. I arrived home a little after nine p.m., the flat cool and quiet, Mr Jones waiting for me at the door. He would need a walk but I suddenly felt very weary and, still wearing my coat, without even turning on the lights, I sat heavily on the sofa.

I took in the familiar possessions in the unfamiliar room, the pictures and posters that I’d not yet got around to hanging, the fading light at the window, the carpet I would not have chosen, the blank TV, too prominent by far.

After several minutes of silence, the telephone rang, the landline, a sound so unusual that it startled me, and I felt strangely nervous about answering.

‘Hello?’

‘Dad?’

‘Albie, you frightened me.’

‘It’s only just gone nine.’

‘No, I mean the landline, I’m not used to it.’

‘I thought you preferred it to the mobile?’

‘I do, it’s just, well, I’m not used to it.’

‘So — d’you want me to call the mobile?’

‘No, this is good. Is anything wrong?’

‘No, nothing’s wrong, I just wanted a chat, s’all.’

He has spoken to his mother, I thought. She has told him, ‘Phone your dad.’ ‘Well, how are you? How’s college?’

‘S’cool.’

‘What are you working on?’

And he told me about his projects in great, incomprehensible detail, with that blameless egotism he has — all answers, no questions — and we had a perfectly nice conversation, clocking in at a mighty eleven and a half minutes, a new international world record for a phone call between father and son. While we spoke I warmed up last night’s rather good soup, then I said goodbye to Albie and ate it standing up. I took Mr Jones for a walk.

Then, closing the door, finding myself quite cheerful and content, and noting that I was still not remotely sleepy, I did something that I’d been privately contemplating for some time. I sat at my computer, opened a new window and I typed the following words …

I’d like to thank Hannah MacDonald, Michael McCoy, Roanna Benn, Damian Barr and Elizabeth Kilgarriff for their advice and encouragement. Also Paula Alexandre, Rhiannon Rose White, Malcolm Logan, Sadie Holland, Natalie Doherty, Dr Claire Isaac, Alison Moulding, Grenville Fox, Jane Brook and Andrew Shennan for their expertise. Any errors are all mine.

I’m grateful to Jonny Geller, Kirsten Foster and all at Curtis Brown, my editor Nick Sayers, Laura Macdougall, Emma Knight, Auriol Bishop and all the team at Hodder & Stoughton. Also Amber Burlinson, Ayse Tashkiran, Sophie Heawood and, in particular, Erica Stewart and Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity (https://www.uk-sands.org/).

Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art was a great help, as were Wikipedia and Google Maps, and I discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letter to Sophie Peabody in Evan S. Connell’s fine novel, Mr Bridge. The epigraph from Far From The Tree is reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Lorrie Moore and Philip Larkin by permission of Faber, Penelope Fitzgerald by permission of 4th Estate and Elizabeth Taylor by permission of Virago, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group. While I’ve done my best to make Douglas’ journey accurate, I’ve sometimes made minor adjustments to reality. For instance, it is not possible to see the Prado from the Plaza de Cibeles, and neither is there a bench in front of Las Meninas.

Finally, love and gratitude is due to Hannah Weaver for her patience and humour, her encouragement and inspiration.

The Grand Tour