It was strange how exhilarated I felt. I had been thrown out of my home, I had been insulted—even someone with less amour propre than I had would have seen Max’s words as insults—and for all I knew the police sirens might be sounding for me any minute, but I felt full of happiness and energy. Adrenaline, I suppose it was, released by the running and the snatching of the money. I rushed into Silver’s room. He wasn’t asleep. He put out his arms to me and I got into bed with him. Quite a long while after that I told him what Max had said and how I had been evicted. I seemed to make a habit of being thrown out of places and wondered what establishment would be next to do it.

“Not this one,” said Silver. “I’ll come back with you to collect your stuff.”

No, I said. That might not be wise. I’d do a Liv, I thought, and keep my refuge a secret from Max and Selina. But first I’d talk to them.

Max is dead now. He has been dead for three years. After Selina left him, perhaps I should say was forced to leave him, when he brought his lover into their home, after what’s usually called an “acrimonious” divorce, 19 Russia Road was sold and the proceeds divided between them. Max bought a little house in a Bayswater mews and married the woman he had been living with, and it was there I went one evening to have dinner with them. By that time we were on friendly if guarded terms. A ring main on the ground floor failed while I was there and I was able, to my great pleasure and with a certain secret triumph, to find the fault and put things right. Max was astounded. Thanking me, he said I obviously had intelligence and what a pity it was I had made so few intellectual demands on it. Six months afterward he was dead.

As for Selina, she never remarried. I sometimes read about her in the papers, in the gossip columns or diary notes. The profile some journalist did of her for The Times last year mentioned a partner, so she’s not alone in the hi-tech ultramodern flat she’s bought in Docklands. Streetwise is of course still running and likely to run for many years.

When I went back into their house that morning, I thought that not only was I descending the iron staircase and entering old Mrs. Fisherton’s for the last time, but that this would be the last time I’d speak to Max and Selina. I never imagined—how could I?—that I’d go to Max’s new home and, ultimately, visit him in the hospital when he was on his deathbed. Nor that Selina and I would regularly exchange Christmas cards and that she, unable to accept the invitation to my wedding, would send me a handsome present of the most expensive kind of food mixer. No, that morning, I thought I was turning my back on them and the house forever.