‘I’m sure,’ said Will, sympathetically. He was getting excited now. If single mothers really thought that all men were bastards, then he could clean up. He could go out with women who looked like Julie Christie forever. He nodded and frowned and pursed his lips while Angie ranted, and while he plotted his new, life-changing strategy.

For the next few weeks he was Will the Good Guy, Will the Redeemer, and he loved it. It was effortless, too. He never managed to strike up much of a rapport with Maisy, Angie’s mysteriously sombre five-year-old, who seemed to regard him as frivolous to his core. But Joe, the three-year-old, took to him almost at once, mostly because during their first meeting Will held him upside-down by his ankles. That was it. That was all it took. He wished that relationships with proper human beings were that easy.

They went to McDonald’s. They went to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. They went on a boat down the river. On the very few occasions when he had thought about the possibility of children (always when he was drunk, always in the first throes of a new relationship), he had convinced himself that fatherhood would be a sort of sentimental photo-opportunity, and fatherhood Angie-style was exactly like that: he could walk hand-in-hand with a beautiful woman, children gambolling happily in front of him, and everyone could see him doing it, and when he had done it for an afternoon he could go home again if he wanted to.

And then there was the sex. Sex with a single mother, Will decided after his first night with Angie, beat the sort of sex he was used to hands down. If you picked the right woman, someone who’d been messed around and eventually abandoned by the father of her children, and who hadn’t met anyone since (because the kids stopped you going out and anyway a lot of men didn’t like kids that didn’t belong to them, and they didn’t like the kind of mess that frequently coiled around these kids like a whirlwind)… if you picked one of these, then she loved you for it. All of a sudden you became better-looking, a better lover, a better person.

As far as he could see, it was an entirely happy arrangement. All those so-so couplings going on out in the world of the childless singles, to whom a night in a foreign bed was just another fuck… they didn’t know what they were missing. Sure, there were right-on people, men and women, who would be repelled and appalled by his logic, but that was fine by him. It reduced the competition.

In the end, the thing that swung it for him in his affair with Angie was that he was not Someone Else. That meant in this case he wasn’t Simon, her ex, who had problems with drink and work, and who, with a cavalier disregard for cliché, turned out to be screwing his secretary. Will found it easy not to be Simon; he had a positive flair for not being Simon, he was brilliant at it. It seemed unfair, in fact, that something he found so effortless should bring him any kind of reward at all, but it did: he was loved for not being Simon more than he had ever been loved simply for being himself.

Even the end, when it came, had an enormous amount to recommend it. Will found endings difficult: he had never quite managed to grasp the bull by the horns, and as a consequence there had hitherto always been some kind of messy overlap. But with Angie it was easy—indeed, it was so easy that he felt there had to be some kind of catch.

They had been going out for six weeks, and there were certain things that he was beginning to find unsatisfactory. Angie wasn’t very flexible, for a start, and the whole kid thing really got in the way sometimes—the week before he had bought tickets for the new Mike Leigh film on the opening night, but she didn’t make it to the cinema until thirty minutes after it had started because the babysitter hadn’t turned up. That really pissed him off, although he felt he managed to disguise his annoyance pretty well, and they had a reasonable evening out anyway. And she could never stay over at his place, so he always had to go round there, and she didn’t have many CDs, and there was no VCR or satellite or cable, so on a Saturday night they always ended up watching Casualty and a crap made-for-TV movie about some kid with a disease. He was just beginning to wonder whether Angie was exactly what he was looking for when she decided to finish it.

They were in an Indian restaurant on Holloway Road when she told him.

‘Will, I’m so sorry, but I’m not sure this is working out.’

He didn’t say anything. In the past, any conversation that began in this way usually meant that she had found something out, or that he had done something mean, or stupid, or grotesquely insensitive, but he really thought that he had kept a clean sheet in this relationship. His silence bought him time while he scanned through the memory bank for any indiscretions he might have forgotten about, but there was nothing. He would have been extremely disappointed if he had found something, an overlooked infidelity, say, or a casual, unmemorable cruelty. As the whole point of this relationship was his niceness, any blemish would have meant that his untrustworthiness was so deeply ingrained as to be ungovernable.

‘It’s not you. You’ve been great. It’s me. Well, my situation, anyway.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your situation. Not as far as I’m concerned.’ He was so relieved that he felt like being generous.

‘There are things you don’t know. Things about Simon.’

‘Is he giving you a hard time? Because if he is…’ You’ll what? he wanted to ask himself contemptuously. You’ll roll yourself a joint when you get home and forget them? You’ll go out with someone a lot easier?

‘No, not really. Well, I suppose it would look like that from the outside. He’s not very happy about me seeing somebody else. And I know how that sounds, but I know him, and he just hasn’t come to terms with us splitting up. And I’m not sure I have either, more to the point. I’m not ready to launch into a relationship with anybody new yet.’

‘You’ve been doing pretty well.’

‘The tragedy is that I’ve met someone just right for me at precisely the wrong time. I should have started with a meaningless fling, not a… not with someone who…’

This, he couldn’t help feeling, was kind of ironic. If she but knew it, he was exactly right; if there was a man better equipped for the meaningless fling, he wouldn’t like to meet him. I’ve been putting this on! he wanted to tell her. I’m horrible! I’m much shallower than this, honest! But it was too late.

‘I did wonder whether I was rushing you. I’ve really cocked this up, haven’t I?’

‘No, Will, not at all. You’ve been brilliant. I’m so sorry that…’

She was starting to get a little tearful, and he loved her for it. He had never before watched a woman cry without feeling responsible, and he was rather enjoying the experience.

‘You don’t have to be sorry for anything. Really.’ Really, really, really.

‘Oh, I do.’

‘You don’t.’

When was the last time he had been in a position to bestow forgiveness? Certainly not since school, and possibly not even then. Of all the evenings he had spent with Angie, he loved the last one the best.

This, for Will, was the clincher. He knew then that there would be other women like Angie—women who would start off by thinking that they wanted a regular fuck, and end up deciding that a quiet life was worth any number of noisy orgasms. As he felt something not dissimilar, although for very different reasons, he knew he had a lot to offer. Great sex, a lot of ego massage, temporary parenthood without tears and a guilt-free parting—what more could a man want? Single mothers—bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them, all over London—were the best invention Will had ever heard of. His career as a serial nice guy had begun.