The street was empty, the air cool, and the sky overcast, the dull pink of faded overwashed clothes, with a segment of moon showing between the ragged edges of the clouds. Is there any time of life when the society of one’s contemporaries is so yearned for as in youth? I know that I need it less and less now. My companions may be older or younger than I am and my own company is increasingly pleasant to me. Anyway, I’m married and highly content with that condition. But then, a dozen years ago, I had hungered without knowing it for people of my own age to talk to and be with. My fellow students at GUP might have served the purpose if only I had gone there often enough and been there long enough to get to know more of them. Now I had friends. Next day I was to climb on the roofs. I slept deeply that night without dreaming, Mabel lying on my pillow, her sleek furry face nuzzling my neck.

The next morning I awoke to a sense of doom impending and recalled, for the first time since Silver rescued me from the underpass, what I ought to have been doing on the previous afternoon and had failed to do. Caroline Bodmer had expected me at two but waited for me in vain. Of course, I knew the sensible, the mature, thing to do next: go upstairs, ask Selina’s permission to use the phone in the yellow drawing room, phone my supervisor, and either speak to her or leave a message on her answering machine. After that, make my way to GUP, attend the “marketing workshop” that happened every other Friday, check that my message had been received . . .

But at this point my imagination faltered. I knew I would do none of it, so why speculate? Why, as Silver might say, fret? I already had a very good idea of the things Silver might say. And how could I get to GUP when the canal bank was closed and my only access to Paddington Station was by way of an underpass I would never dare enter again?