He made tea. It took a long time because his hands are bad, and neither of us said anything for the whole of it, which I have since realised he was doing on purpose.
Then he sat down opposite me and told me about Marigold.
She was born in 1974. She had Down syndrome. He was twenty-three years old and his wife was twenty-two.
And in 1974, in this county, people told you what to do about that.
I am not going to reproduce what he was told, in detail, by a doctor and by a priest and by his own mother, because he said it to me once in that front room and it is not mine.
The shape of it is that everybody who had authority over a twenty-three-year-old in 1974 told him the same thing, which is that she should go into an institution, and that it was kinder, and that he would have other children and should get on with it.
He listened to them.
She went at fourteen months. He visited for the first two years and then it got further and then his wife could not do it any more, and then they stopped, and then in 1981 his wife left.
Marigold died in 1985. She was eleven.
He found out by letter, eleven days afterward, because the address they had for him was four years out of date.
And in fifty years, that man has never told one single person on that street that she existed.
Not one. Nobody knew.
The house he shouts at children from has a photograph on the mantelpiece of a girl in a blue cardigan, and no one alive in that town had seen it before I did.
I asked him why he never told anybody, and I asked it badly, in the way you do when you are thirty-six and out of your depth.
And he said: what would I have said?
Then he said the rest of it, slowly, because he had clearly worked it out a long time ago and had never had anybody to say it to.
He said that for the first ten years he could not say it because he was ashamed, and that after she died he could not say it because then he would have had to say what he had done and what had happened, and by about 1995 he had been on that street for twenty years as a man with no children.
