LEAVING WINDOWS OPEN ON the top floor is all very well. To do so in a basement is unwise. But I had left my bedroom window open and it was as well I had: Mabel had come in during the night and was asleep on my bed. She woke up when breakfast was put down for her and I told her how I’d been on the roofs. Maybe I’d meet her up there one night but I cautioned her to be careful. I, after all, would be unlikely to leap off a mansard in pursuit of a butterfly.

I’m not going to say much about the night, my first with Silver, except that it was lovely and I was happy. I was happy for the first time since Daniel died on the pylon. I told him a bit about Daniel, just that I had been in love with someone who had died, and he told me about his ideas of life. He’d been at Queen Mary College in the University of London but he had dropped out, it wasn’t for him. Unlike me and my shilly-shallying, he had left correctly, informing the authorities that he had had enough and was going. At the age of sixteen Silver had inherited enough from his grandmother to provide him with an income. He had refused to apply for a grant but had paid his own way, just as he gave his parents rent for the flat. Jack and Erica Silverman despaired of him. Their daughter and their other son were so conventional, so normal. Erica sometimes wondered, while saying she knew this was absurd, if something had happened to him, during that lost weekend I was yet to hear about, that had left a trauma which would affect him always.

Silver and I became lovers and were what Jonny called an “item.” At that time each of us believed that there could be no one else for us, it was almost laughable to think of some intervening third. He had a poem he used to quote, something about your face in mine eye, mine in yours appears, I don’t suppose I’ve got it right, but that’s how it was for us. And the funny thing was, considering I was just twenty and he was due to become twenty in a month’s time, that ours was a mature love, the kind that middle-aged people long to achieve after a lifetime of mistakes and painful breakups. Or so we thought and told each other. Pompous, weren’t we? Proud of being in love. Starry-eyed, sitting entwined on the rooftops, we solemnly declared to each other how we had fallen in love at first sight. I could do even better, for I had loved him before we’d met.