She was the only woman I’ve ever known who actually liked mice. I once asked her if there were a lot of them running round Kiruna but she said she had never seen a mouse before she came here. I promised to remove Mabel. Although I much prefer cats to mice, I could see Liv’s point and, for some reason—surely not because she was a mouse fancier?—I started liking her from then on. I’ve said she was rather unattractive in those days. I’ve often noticed, and I’m sorry it’s there for me to notice, I don’t much like it, that women who are with a man they don’t care for, a man they’ve a duty to or simply don’t know how to escape from, soon start looking plain and drab. When they get a new man or they take on another, not instead of but as well as, they blossom out and become pretty, even beautiful in some cases. Love conquers all, I suppose. Well, I know it does, I have reason to know.

Silver, who knows the Bible and likes phrases from it, used to say Liv was like Leah, the first wife of Jacob, she was “sore-eyed and tender,” and that describes her very well, the pinkishness round her eyes and on the lids and the chapped look of her face. Her hair always wanted washing. If she didn’t bite her nails, she tore at the cuticles and picked the skin on her lips. But once she had Wim, or thought she had Wim, at any rate had slept with him and meant to do so again, her skin cleared and her hair shone and she grew some of the longest pointed fingernails I’ve seen on a woman’s hand. She stopped slouching and cuticle-chewing, stood upright and started washing her clothes. Whether Wim noticed any of this I don’t know. I know so little about him except for his passion for the roofs of tall buildings.

“Now if Liv were only a tower block,” Silver said that evening when we were alone on the roofs, “Wim would be on top of her all the time.”

As Silver had predicted, the scaffolding had gone up, its vertical poles planted in the garden between the end of the Torrington Gardens terrace and the first house in Peterborough Avenue. There was very little difference in height, each was five stories high, not counting the basement. We crossed the scaffolding easily and pulled ourselves up onto the leads. The long row of small squat pillars, each one molded in a chair-leg shape, cast a strange ladderlike shadow onto the paleish roof surface.