At last, when we’d been waiting for about three hours, she went into the bedroom. As she put it herself, she had nowhere else to go. Silver’s firm “You can go home to Sweden, I’ll call a cab and take you down to it and go to Heathrow with you” had no effect. After she had gone I asked him why he liked Jonny. What is it you see in him, was what I said.

He sighed. He suddenly looked much older. That extreme fairness fades early, the skin reddening, the shining blond hair turning to straw. I put my arms around him and hugged him tight. After a while he said, “You know that money I’ve got, that came to me from my grandmother, it’s a capital sum that yields ten thousand a year. It’s not really very much, it’s a starting salary for lots of people, but it’s a hell of a lot when you’re seventeen and you don’t have to work for it. Getting it is like having a door opened for you onto unlimited freedom. And having this flat handed over to me, that’s another freedom opener.”

In the silence I asked him what that had to do with Jonny.

“It made me able to know people like Jonny. I mean, I had my own place and I had my money. I’m a fool, Clo, but my excuse is that I was young, I am young. When I met Jonny coming out of that flat, up on the roofs, I mean, I just thought what experience it would be to know a burglar. A real-life burglar. It had been the same with Wim, a strange person, a sort of human spider, who treated the roofs of London the way other people treat mountains. The difference was that Wim’s okay but Jonny isn’t. If I hadn’t been able to afford him, if I hadn’t had this place and I wasn’t able to afford to let him live here when he wants to rent-free, if I couldn’t afford to buy wine and food and have his girlfriend here, if I couldn’t do those things, he’d have come once, I expect, but never again. And now I’m stuck with him. Aren’t I? If there’s a way out, I’d like to know what it is.”

I said thoughtfully, “It’s wrong for young people to have money come to them too soon, isn’t it?”

“I expect it’s all right for people with very strong characters.”

“But you are like that.”