Bob nodded in the direction of Proteus, companionably sharing the sofa with him and said, rather guiltily, ‘I’m only finishing what he didn’t want.’ Proteus was propped up and bumpered with pillows and cushions. He was covered in food from head to toe, not just the stewed apples but a variety of suspect stains which Bob helpfully mapped – ‘Marmite, Ambrosia Creamed Rice, Ready Brek – this thing’s a gannet.’ Well, it takes one to know one.

Professor Cousins perched himself gingerly on the edge of the only other available seating – a chair on which a pair of Bob’s Dr Who underpants were unbecomingly draped.

‘Why is Proteus here?’ I asked Bob, who gave the baby a speculative look and said, ‘Is that its name?’

‘It’s a he. It’s Kara’s baby, you’ve seen him lots of times before.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘of course, that big girl who always smells of the barnyard. He’s a nice little chap, isn’t he?’

‘But why is he here?’ I persisted patiently to Bob.

With a long-suffering sigh, Bob tore his eyes away from Big Ted, Little Ted and friends. ‘Because that girl left him here.’

‘And out of the millions, if not billions, of girls in the world which one would that be?’

‘She said she was your friend.’

‘Terri?’

‘No.’

‘Andrea?’

‘The lovely one,’ Bob said, his features softening as if he was a devout Catholic referring to the Virgin Mary.

‘Olivia?’

‘She said she had something she had to do and would you look after him.’

Perhaps Proteus has taken on the role of the parcel in Pass the Parcel, or a chain letter that had to be handed on. Perhaps – after bringing good luck and wealth to everyone who dutifully passed him on (and unfortunate consequences to those who didn’t) – he would eventually get back to Kara. If the odds were against him he could pass through the hands of the entire population of the world before returning to his mother. How old would he be then? And how long would it take for a baby to be handed round the world? (That would be an interesting experiment.)

‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to find his mother and hand him back?’ Professor Cousins suggested, unwrapping his head from the red scarf, like a boiled pudding, or even a clootie dumpling.

‘What’s-her-name said something about Karen being at a women’s thingy meeting in Windsor Place,’ Bob said.

‘You mean Kara?’

‘Do I?’

‘At a women’s liberation group meeting?’

‘The round window!’ Bob shouted suddenly at the television and Proteus squirmed in terror.

Was Olivia all right? And was an abortion the ‘thing’ she’d had to do? If I was her friend I wasn’t a very good one.

I offered Professor Cousins a cup of tea but at that moment the power went off, much to Bob’s distress as he was destined never to know now what was through the round window.

Bob finally recognized Professor Cousins and started enthusiastically explaining to him his idea for his dissertation: ‘On Jekyll and Hyde, ’cos it deals with like one of the universal myths of western society,’ Bob said enthusiastically, waving his arms around like an uncoordinated beetle. ‘There’s all these ur-stories, ur-plots, ur-myths, right?’

Professor Cousins looked concerned and asked Bob if he always had a stammer.

‘The Enemy Within,’ Bob said, ignoring the question.

‘Stevenson?’ Professor Cousins, furrowing his brow in an effort to follow Bob.

‘No, Star Trek,’ Bob said patiently. ‘Captain Kirk gets split into two people by a transporter malfunction – the good Kirk and the evil Kirk.’

‘Ah, dualistic theories of good and evil,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘Manicheism, Zoroastrianism.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bob said, ‘the interesting thing is that the good Kirk can’t live without the evil Kirk – now what does that tell you?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Then there’s this other episode called “Mirror, Mirror” where all the crew of the Enterprise have doubles—’

‘And the doubles are all evil?’ Professor Cousins guessed.

‘Exactly!’ Bob said. ‘And then Kirk has to use this thing called the Tantalus Field—’

I was distracted from this critical analysis by the sight of Proteus trying to eat the top hat piece from the Monopoly board. I supposed it was lucky that he had chosen that rather than the large lump of Moroccan that had been sitting next to it, nonetheless this was no place for a baby.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Professor Cousins said when I started gathering up Proteus’s things, none of which he’d had yesterday.

‘Yeah,’ Bob said, ‘she said she’d had to buy him stuff.’

Olivia had spent a fortune on Proteus. She’d bought nappies and Mothercare Babygros as white as newborn lambs, Tommee-Tippee cups, a Peter Rabbit cereal bowl, a bone china egg coddler, a baby-blue rabbit, Osh-Kosh dungarees in a blue-and-white butcher’s apron stripe, a pair of corduroy bootees and enough cleansing, wiping, moisturizing ‘stuff’ to stock a small branch of Boots.

‘His holdall’s over there,’ Bob said. ‘It should have everything you need. His jacket’s in the hall. His nappy’s been changed and he’s due a sleep but if he’s hungry there’s food in his bag.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I stared at Bob in amazement.

‘What?’ He started rolling a joint and in the absence of television opened a 1968 Blue Peter Annual.

‘Nothing, just for a minute there you sounded like a grown-up person.’

‘Not me,’ Bob said cheerfully.

I found Professor Cousins in the hall, trying to fold up Proteus’s buggy, like someone in a comic film trying to work out a deckchair.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked as we commenced the tortuous journey down the stairs.

‘A women’s liberation meeting.’

‘Well, that will be a first for me,’ he said. ‘I do hope I fit in.’

‘Wait!’ Bob shouted after me, retrieving something from down the side of the sofa. He handed me a well-worn and quite filthy dummy. ‘You’ll need this,’ Bob said. ‘It works better than Elastoplast, believe me, I’ve tried everything.’