The sideboard drawers weren’t full of silver cutlery and damask tablecloths as I had expected. I had forgotten for a moment that old Mrs. Fisherton had been poor for the greater part of her life and not likely to have accumulated that kind of thing. The objects she had brought with her when Max installed her in the basement of 19 Russia Road were the kind you see on stalls at country antique fairs. I had been to one with my mother before the pylon and I recognized what in her words were “old lady’s paraphernalia”: poker-work napkin rings, cross-stitch matchbox cases, a pomander, numerous glass and pottery ashtrays, a pincushion, combs for the kind of hair you put up, egg cozies, a china toast rack in the shape of a row of butterflies, a pottery jam dish with a silver handle and a spoon suspended from it, and more, much more. Mabel, of course, got into the top drawer and began an ecstatic licking of one of the egg cozies. I lifted her out and tried the drawer below. It contained nothing but three plates, the kind some people hang up on walls, one white with a dark blue and red and gold pattern, one green and shaped like a layering of cabbage leaves and the third blue and white in what I now suppose was a willow pattern. The drawer below was full of neatly folded blue-and-white striped table napkins. I put Liv’s money in the back of it.

When I’m working on a house that’s been converted I always think about the metamorphosis of buildings, how they started one way maybe 150 years ago, were altered twenty years later, had another makeover early in the last century, were added to, divided up, split into flats, had other radical changes made to them and finally (only it won’t be final) were practically rebuilt, as the Gilmore has been. I sometimes think that all the avatars of those buildings are still there, the Victorian versions, the Edwardian, the thirties flats, the mid-century apartments and penthouses, and that they might occasionally appear like phantoms or come in dreams. An earlier version of Max’s house did come to me in a dream the night I hid the money. The yellow drawing room was divided by double doors and all three resulting rooms were small and crowded. In the smallest, overlooking a garden tenebrous with ilexes and holly, a little boy was sitting on a rocking horse, crying. I’d never seen him before, he was no one I knew, a dark brown boy with black curly hair, the tears on his cheeks like pearls. Before I could go to him and ask what was wrong I woke up, put out my hand and touched Mabel’s wet fur, the rain-drops on her whiskers. It had poured in the night and was still raining.