She was still quite warm, her fur smooth and sleek, the green velvet collar untouched. It had happened not long before. Maybe the car that had raced down Peterborough Avenue and braked and revved had come this way, down this street, and come just as fast and carelessly. I held her body in my arms and Silver stroked her head. The golden eyes were dull and glazed. Silver did something for which I would love him forever if I hadn’t already loved him. He closed her eyes with his fingertips.

There was no blood. I couldn’t see a mark on her. We carried her down the iron staircase and into old Mrs. Fisherton’s and there we wrapped her up in a sweater of mine, a nice one I loved, not an old thing to be discarded, and the next day we buried her in the garden of 15 Russia Road. But that night, weeping, I asked Silver if it was my fault for not keeping her up there in his flat with me. Or did he think that by carrying her into No. 15 I’d introduced her to that dangerous road?

We’d never know the answers to those questions, he said. Speculating was useless. The likelihood was that she had often been out into the street. After all, to find me in the first place she had apparently come all the way from Sutherland Avenue, and unlike us, had avoided the safe highway of the roofs. He never once said she was “only a cat” or advised me to get another immediately. We went to bed and I cried and he held me in his arms until I fell asleep.

Chapter 16

16

SILVER AND I WENT along to the Clifton Nursery and bought plants for Mabel’s grave. July isn’t the best time of the year for planting anything and it’s too late for sowing seeds. I didn’t know any of this then but Silver did. Being young, we wanted instant results the way children do, so we bought coleus with leaves striped in red and green and chocolate and a pink and white fuchsia and a red geranium already in bloom. On my latest visit to No. 15, only a few weeks ago, I went to look at the grave for the first time in eleven years. The coleus had all died in the first of that autumn’s frosts and the geranium had withered the way geraniums do, but the fuchsia was going strong, a big bush three feet high and covered in buds.