“You want to use mine?” I said. “Okay, you can, but wait a minute. If you’ve got the money why does your father have to send you your airfare?”

Liv sat down. She looked me straight in the eye. She put up her hands and pushed her long wispy fair hair away from her face. “I am not using that money, Clodagh. That is my saving—is that right, saving?—for my future. It is to start. Then I put more with it and more and one day be rich.”

There was no more talk of keeping the money to give it back to Claudia and James. Or offering it to the police as a way of getting out of drunk-driving charges. She had learned her lesson from Jonny. I had a curious feeling she would never spend the money, never even dip into it. And I felt then, perhaps for the first time, that people’s attitude to money only takes shape when they earn or acquire or even perhaps steal their first sizable sum. That’s when you see generosity develop or profligacy, meanness, or what psychiatrists call anal retention. Liv belonged in this last category. She had got the money and passionately needed to keep it, every penny, there should be no dipping into it, no spoiling or even touching the inviolate sum. It must be preserved intact, like some heirloom, in its entirety.

She hadn’t kept it in any of the obvious places, that is, wrapped up in plastic and floating in the lavatory cistern or in a parcel under the mattress. It was in the bedroom she shared with Jonny, lying, unwrapped, between the television set and the video recorder on which the set stood. From a short distance away the notes, all of them lined up, edge to edge and corner to corner, were invisible. You’d only have seen them if you peered closely while sliding a cassette in and out, and since Jonny was uninterested in videos because he only watched sports, he’d never even looked in that direction. While Silver lifted up the television Liv slid the notes out. She began to count them.