A couple of years later Diana Lomax had her first operation for cancer. A year after that she died. Jack wept when he heard the news as he had done when he came downstairs that Monday morning and she lifted Silver off the counter and put him into his arms.

“I don’t really like to say this,” I said, “but have you ever thought that maybe it was Diana Lomax who took you away?”

“Of course. Often. When I was fifteen and got keen on finding out,” he said. “I thought my dad was going to hit me when I suggested it. I still suppose it’s possible. But if she did what did she want me for?”

That was something else I hadn’t liked to ask, and hadn’t asked.

“A couple of doctors examined me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Nothing. And not a mark on me. Diana didn’t want a child, she’d had three children, all grown up by then. She had two grandchildren she saw a lot of. She had a job, she had a boyfriend in the same village, she wasn’t lonely or frustrated or psychologically disturbed. The police questioned her for hours, they investigated her background, searched her house. There was nothing.”

I asked him what he personally thought had happened to him. “I don’t know. I haven’t an idea. I’d like to know, though I never will now. Sometimes I think I remember a boat, being in a sailing boat or seeing a sailing boat, and sometimes I see a room with a green armchair and birds on a mantelpiece, but I only think I do. I may have made those things up. There are three days of my life unaccounted for, a sort of lost weekend like people have from heavy drinking. Alcohol amnesia, except that all I used to drink in those days was milk and orange juice.”

Both our stories—you could hardly call them “peak experiences,” because they were neither good nor pleasurable events—involved heights. I asked Silver if he thought that significant and he said it must be. We walked around the roofs a bit after that, going in the other direction toward Castlemaine Road, jumping over the chasms between the terraces nearly as well as Wim would have done. Both of us, it appeared, had had our baptism of fire and it had left us with a lifelong yearning to be high above the world.