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A great deal of stress is placed on the importance of humour in the modern relationship. Everything will be all right, we are led to believe, as long as you can make each other laugh, rendering a successful marriage as, in effect, fifty years of improv. To someone who felt in need of fresh new material, as I did during that long, dehydrated night of the soul, this was a cause for concern. I had always enjoyed making Connie laugh, it was satisfying and reassuring because laughter, I suppose, relies on surprise and it’s good to surprise. But like a fading athlete, my response times had slowed and now it was not unusual for me to find the perfect witty comeback to remarks made several years ago. Consequently I had been resorting to old tricks, old stories, and I sometimes felt that Connie had spent the first three years laughing at my jokes and the next twenty-one sighing at them. Somewhere along the way I had mislaid my sense of humour and was now only capable of puns, which are not the same thing at all. ‘I fear the wurst!’ The joke had occurred to me in the beer hall, and I wondered if I might use it over breakfast. I would offer her a pale sausage, and when she refused I’d say, ‘The trouble with you, Connie, is that you always fear the wurst!’ It was a good joke, though perhaps not enough in itself to save our marriage.

Yet undeniably there had once been a time when I made Connie laugh constantly, and when I became a father I had hoped to develop this amusing persona further. I pictured myself as a kind of Roald Dahl figure, eccentric and wise, conjuring up characters and stories out of air, our children dangling off me, their faces bright with laughter, delight and love. I never quite achieved this, I don’t know why; perhaps it was because of what happened to our daughter. Certainly that changed me, changed both of us. Life seemed a little heavier after that.

Anyway, I don’t think Albie ever appreciated my lighter side. I did my best but my manner was queasy and self-conscious, like a children’s entertainer who knows his act is failing. I could remove the top of my thumb and put it back again but unless a child is particularly witless, this material wears pretty thin. And Albie had never been witless. When I put on funny voices to read a story, he became visibly embarrassed. In fact, when I thought about it, it was hard to recall if I had ever made my son laugh through something other than personal injury, and I sometimes wished Connie would tell him, ‘You might not appreciate this, Egg, but once upon a time your father used to make me laugh so much, so much, we’d talk all night and laugh until we cried. Once upon a time.’

Now, I feared the wurst.

Sadly we left before breakfast and took an early taxi through the sleeping city to Munich Airport, about which there is little to say. Picture an airport.

I dreaded England. Like a failed football team returning from some nine-nil humiliation, we sat in the departure lounge, quite unable to speak or even raise our eyes. I’d like to apologise for my son. Forever I would carry with me the sight of his face, the shock and shame, as if I had slapped him, which in a way I had. And it was here, I suppose, that the football team analogy broke down. We weren’t a team. I was the goalie who had let in all nine goals.

Would I go back to the office nearly two weeks early? What would they say? Would they sense it? This man’s holiday was so bad that it destroyed his family! They fled, actually fled; one in Holland, one in Germany. Even if I didn’t go to work, even if Connie and I stayed at home with the curtains drawn, we would be tormented by the absence of Albie. As I remarked more than once, he might be having a perfectly civilised time. He had a passport, a phone, access to money, Camus and a highly sexed girlfriend; in some ways it was an enviable situation. But without knowing for sure, with those words still between us, it was impossible not to squirm with anxiety. Apologise for my son. Was he in some crack-den in Berlin? Drunk on a branch line in the Czech Republic, stoned in a squat in Rotterdam, beaten up in an alley in Madrid? Would he return in September, October, Christmas, at all? What about college? Would he abandon the education he had fought for, albeit rather feebly? What if Europe simply … swallowed him up?

I could no longer sit still. ‘I’m going to go for a stroll,’ I said.

‘Now?’

‘There’s plenty of time.’

‘I’ll see you at the gate,’ she shrugged. ‘Take your bag.’

There’s a certain optimism in going for a walk in airports. What on earth do we expect to find — something new and enchanting? I strolled off to see what a German newsagents looked like and, having discovered that it looked like a British newsagents, was about to purchase some Soft Mints with the last of my loose euros when my phone rang.

I scrabbled in my pocket. Perhaps it was Albie. The display indicated a +39 number — Spain, Italy?