None of this seemed to carry any weight whatever. I’m not sure he even heard. ‘I want to find them,’ he repeated. ‘I want you to find them.’

It would be foolish to pretend that I had not by this stage worked out that this was where we were headed. But it was not a task I relished. Nor was I in the least sure I would undertake it. ‘Why me?’

‘When I met you I had only slept with four girls.’ He paused. I raised my eyebrows faintly. Any man of my generation will understand that this was impressive in itself. At nineteen, which is what we were when we first came across each other, I do not believe I had done much more than kiss on the dance floor. He hadn’t finished. ‘I knew all four until well into the early 1970s and it definitely wasn’t one of them. Then you and I ran around for a while, and I kept myself fairly busy. A couple of years later, when that period had come to an end, we went to Portugal. And after that I was sterile. Besides, look at the writing, look at the paper, read the phrases. This woman is educated-’

‘And histrionic. And drunk.’

‘Which does not prevent her being posh.’

‘I’ll say.’ I considered his theory some more. ‘What about the years between the end of the Season and Portugal?’

He shook his head. ‘A few, mainly scrubbers, and a couple left over from our times together. Not one who had a baby before that summer.’ He sighed wearily. ‘Anyway, nobody lives a lie who hasn’t got something to lose. Something worth holding on to, something that would be endangered by the truth. She wrote to me in 1990 when the upper and upper middle classes occupied the last remaining bastion of legitimate birth. Anyone normal would have let the secret out of the bag long ago.’ The effort of saying all this, plus the log work, had depleted what remained of his energy and he sank back into his chair with a groan.