Sitting up there in the warm nights of that long hot glorious summer or walking on the leads or daring new feats of climbing and abseiling and ascending ropes, we learned to love each other. So much of the time we were alone, talking, kissing, laughing, or silent and close in the quiet of the heights. Sometimes we picnicked, our backs against a parapet, eating chicken wings and Boursin cheese and the ciabatta, which was new in the shops, drinking milk or Coke, but never wine. Below us the fourth- or fifth-floor flat-dwellers were retiring to bed and we saw the pale vaporous gleam of their lights fade from the black air as one after another they were switched off.

Up there no one bought or sold anything or advertised anything. There were no notices telling you to do this and not to do that, no phones to ring, no television screens—only the antennas that made those screens function— no background music, no rules and, in a strange way, no time. Silver took his watch off before going on the roofs and, following his example, I began to do the same. One night in early July we slept up there, Silver and I. We chose the flat roof of one of the terraces in Torrington Gardens, took sleeping bags and a futon, two cushions from the leather sofa and a blanket from old Mrs. Fisherton’s. The evening was dark, though there was a thin lemon-peel moon, and above lamp-standard level the air had that reddish smoky look and feel so characteristic of London nights. We had no means of knowing at what time dawn came, but we saw it come. We saw a round red sun rise over the City, paint the glassy towers with phosphorescence and, as it brightened and lost its shape, sprinkle across the sky feathers of pink and lilac. It was cold in the early morning, sharp as December. We wrapped ourselves in the sleeping bags and drank the hot milky coffee from the flask we had brought with us. The sun climbed the sky and grew warm and down there in the streets the traffic began and the people started hurrying to the tube at Warwick Avenue. A dog appeared in Torrington Gardens and stood on the pavement barking at something invisible to us behind a windowpane. The garden of the house we had slept above was full of roses, climbers and standards and tea roses, and we told each other we could smell them in the clean morning sunshine.

I said I couldn’t tell you why we loved the roofs, but I see that I was wrong and I have told you. “We could get hooked on this,” Silver said, his arms around me, “and then we’d never want to go down.”