He had to tell it as it had been told to him over the years by his parents and his brother and sister, for he had no memory of what had happened. When he was fifteen his mother had been very keen on the idea of Repressed Memory Syndrome and had coaxed him into encounters with a therapist who claimed to be able to dredge up out of the unconscious everything that had ever happened to the subject. Provided, that is, she was given plenty of time and she could catch her client young enough. Silver had been very taken with the idea of inventing experiences and had thought up blood-curdling events he claimed to have taken place in his early life. And when, later, he confessed that everything he had told her was a hoax, she’d have none of it, saying he was making excuses because he was afraid to confront the dreadful magnitude of what he remembered. Of course, he saw that he couldn’t win. He was bored with it anyway and was going to tell her at their next encounter that he had had enough when his mother read in a magazine (and immediately believed what she read) that an eminent psychiatrist had denied the validity of RMS and called it a cruel deception which destroyed relationships and split families. That was the end of any outside intervention in recapturing what had happened to him. He went on trying privately to remember, but most of what he ever brought up out of his unconscious was a cliff with pink flowers on it and very green grass, his sister running, white gulls swooping and wheeling.

“When I see gulls now,” he said, “those gulls we get on the canal, that’s what always comes back, the flowers on the cliff and Rachel running down the slope. Birds and a boat come into it too. But nothing much else.”

He was three years old. His brother and sister were much older, Rachel nine and Julian eleven. The family—the parents and the three children—were on holiday in a hotel on the Cornish coast. It was high summer, the middle of August. Silver wasn’t called Silver then, that came later, when he was at school, but by his given name, Michael. They were all out for a walk along the cliffs before going on the beach.

The cliffs are very high there, limestone escarpments, overgrown at that time of the year with Livingstone daisies and at the top with bilberry bushes and gorse. The bottoms of the cliffs are rough with sharp pointed protuberances, like the feet of reptiles, but the sand, when the tide goes out, is smooth and hard and ocher-colored. How high, I wanted to know, and he said just about as high as the terraces in Russia Road.