Wim was hooked. He had no reason for going on the roofs but the roofs themselves, to conquer them, to own them, to be them. At that time I had no idea what he had been before he came to Silver’s, or where he had been or what he had done or anything about his background. Wim is a Dutch name but he insisted his surname was Smith, or, laughing, Van de Smith when people asked about the Dutch connection.

“I can be Smith if Clodagh can be Brown,” he once said.

Silver told me he had a job but he didn’t know exactly what it was, something menial, he thought, in the catering trade. I was going to write that he was an educated person and intelligent. Later on I found out that this was true but I didn’t know it then. When someone is mostly silent, secretive, contained, you don’t know. The obstacle to understanding was that normal people don’t want to spend their lives, every free moment they have, ranging the roofs of buildings. You start thinking they are mad. Perhaps Wim was. When he told Silver he could have traveled from Maida Vale to Notting Hill on the roofs he very likely wasn’t exaggerating, for he used ropes like a mountaineer, and all the rest of the equipment of Alpinism. What little money he spent went on that and on the dark tracksuits he wore for the roofs and the special trainers. Once or twice I saw him do a line of cocaine but he never used any other drug and he never drank.

Good as we were at our strange exercise, we couldn’t keep up with Wim, and he never took any of us with him. If she hoped to accompany him, if she hoped he might come to love her, Liv was only storing up unhappiness for herself. He loved no one and nothing but the roofs, with the possible exception of Silver, the only one of us to whom he showed any feeling, embracing him in a rigid, sexless, almost detached way whenever he arrived at the flat. Of those embroidered silk tunics he had several, the red one and a white and a yellow, but a closer look showed them to be old and worn, the cuffs frayed and the embroidery stitches scuffed. Sometimes he slept at Silver’s in a sleeping bag under a big rosewood table, turning it into a kind of four-poster bed. I once accidentally entered the bathroom while he was in there and found him shaving his head with an electric razor. He turned and gave me a strange look, not indignant or surprised but puzzled, rather, as if he had never seen me before and wondered who I was.