There ought to be a period in everyone’s life when time is of no account. It happens when you’re a small child before you know about time. Your mother thinks about it for you, tells you when to do this and that and looks after you. But once you go to school you have to learn about time and that’s when you may become its slave, always clock-watching, your fate determined, whether you’re going to be a permanently late person or a punctual person. There’s school and then there’s some kind of further education and then a job and maybe a time never comes again when time doesn’t matter. For us, our timeless time was that summer, when we had no need to get anywhere at any particular moment or count the minutes to something or set an alarm or even make a date. We never had no-time again, it went away in September never to return, and for the past eleven years I’ve been as much time’s fool (Silver’s expression, from Shakespeare, I think) as anyone else.

But that night we were in the midst of our timeless time. I don’t know how long we three sat up there, not talking much and then not talking at all, smoking, eating Wim’s chocolate, and looking at the lights, watching the moon rise and set or just disappear behind a cloud, to be driven in through the window finally by the cold that comes stealthily after midnight. Silver came back with me for the first time to old Mrs. Fisherton’s and together we crept down the iron staircase. The following morning wasn’t Beryl’s day and Selina never put in one of her surprise appearances before ten. I still felt nervous about it, telling myself I was indulging in too much deceitful behavior, and resolved to clear at least one matter up the next day. I’d tell Max I’d been given my marching orders from the Grand Union Polytechnic. While Silver was asleep with Mabel stretched out alongside his back, I went into the dining room and checked on Liv’s money. It was in the drawer, quite safe, all £2,000 of it.

By a coincidence that might have been an unpleasant one, Selina did come downstairs and into old Mrs. Fisherton’s sometime during the morning. Silver had only just gone. From the front window Mabel had watched his departure up the iron staircase and then gone out herself. I had opened some windows to get rid of the cigarette smoke, so all in all I thought I’d had a lucky escape from many perils.