Eventually, of course, GUP would throw me out and I’d lose my grant. But very likely not before the end of June. Deciding not to think about it till the following Monday, I got up, opened a can of sardines for Mabel, and, peering upward at the bedroom window, saw over the top of the wall that it was a lovely morning. Mabel ate her breakfast and went out. Craning out of the open window as far as I could, I watched her scale the sheer face of brickwork, stroll across the lawn and, poised quivering at the foot of the wall between us and 17, leap for the top of it, making the ascent with the greatest of ease. She sat there, evidently pleased with herself, surveying from her eminence the spread-out world below. I smiled at her and waved. I understood.

All that time is very sharp in my memory. The details are etched in stone. And that is as well because I either noted nothing down in my diary or the relevant notebook is lost. But I remember. I even remember what I wore. I put on my black jeans and a black T-shirt with a big red apple on the front of it. It was warm enough to go out without a jacket. I put my washing in a black plastic bag and took it to the launderette. Then, while my clothes were going around in the machine, I did something I had never done before. I bought a newspaper.

The day was one of those on which, according to the table of contents on the front page, the paper carried its “situations vacant” advertisements. It had occurred to me as I was walking along, carrying my bag, that when my grant ceased I’d need a job. Whether I would still be able to live at old Mrs. Fisherton’s if I was no longer in academe or on its fringes was something I’d decided to think about later. Did I, after all, want to go on living there? On the other hand, I had nowhere else to go. I took my newspaper to one of the tables outside the café opposite and bought myself a cappuccino.

The café had a notice in its window advertising for kitchen staff. I turned to the paper. But if jobs existed for the unskilled there was nothing like that in the “situations vacant.” Those in demand were all required to have qualifications or experience. I thought of going into the café and asking if I’d do, but did I really want a job at this moment? Did I want it yet? And if I worked at this popular café, where Max and Selina quite often dropped in on Saturday mornings, I’d soon be found out. So instead of offering myself as a washer of dishes or mopper of floors, I turned back idly to the front page.