The two bigger children nagging at her and whining, the baby in her arms, she went to a bank in St. John’s Wood and changed the money into £50 notes. Round the corner, in the High Street, she bought a money belt. The tin went into the rubbish bin along with all the food that was daily thrown away. From that time forward—while worrying that the bank might tell Claudia and James about the note-changing—she wore the money belt. Not that there was much time forward.

She was still seeing Jonny, going about with him, as they say, running around with him. There was very little going about or running around. Mostly, it was sex and drinking. Jonny believed that women dislike sex but engage in it from other aims than love or pleasure: gain, advancement, keeping men quiet, avoiding violence. This was certainly true in Liv’s case. You might say that all these motives were hers. She let Jonny make love to her because she sensed that she might one day need him. Their encounters followed a set pattern: drinking in one or other of Maida Vale’s pubs or the rougher pubs of Kilburn, much preferred by him, followed by a sexual encounter in the open air or the back of the van he had recently bought. He wasn’t anxious to spend more money on her than was strictly necessary, but he thought the alcohol essential to keeping her compliant. Jonny disliked spending money, though he was making quite a lot of it.

He had a scam going at the car park. In an expansive moment, he told Silver about it. It consisted in somehow—I have never known quite how— fixing the machine that stamped the time on customers’ tickets to print two hours on the ticket but register one hour. The customer would pay for the two hours’ parking he or she had had and Jonny would pocket half of what he was paid. He was subtle about this, careful not to overdo it, and of course there were many occasions, most occasions probably, when a car was only parked for one hour. But it was a nice little earner, as he put it, and he held on to that job until he got the sack for harassment and habitual use of obscene language to female car-park users.

What Silver saw in him I never could understand. But Silver was that rarity who simply likes other people, all other people. Jonny was amoral, and more than that, to use one of Silver’s words, now outdated in its meaning, he was wicked. His eye was for the main chance, he was the complete solipsist, others being there merely for his use and comfort. “Love” was to him a meaningless word. Jealousy, on the other hand, was within his understanding, as we all came to see. It might better be called possessiveness.