‘I was intoxicated by her combination of beauty and clarity and candour’

Jeremy Gavron meets John Hayes, the man over whom his mother killed herself

• Read Rachel Cooke’s interview with Jeremy Gavron here

I have had John Hayes’s telephone number for a year now, without finding the courage to call him. A friend of my stepmother knows him. He still lives, she told me, with the man he was living with when he was seeing Hannah, who is also called John. The two Johns, she calls them. Not for the first time, I sit with the number and a phone in front of me. Even this makes me nervous. This is the man who had an affair with my mother, “cuckolded” my father. Over whom she killed herself.

It is mid-morning. He is probably out, I tell myself. What if I just dial, listen to his voice on the answer machine? I watch my finger move from one key to the next, listen to the echo of the rings. One, two. Before I can hang up, a man’s voice answers, says that he is John.

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