It frightened me more than when Beryl appeared in my bedroom or when Selina just turned up, walked into the flat when it pleased her or was to be discovered sitting in one of my armchairs. This time it couldn’t be Selina, for Selina never knocked, it must be someone with a message to say one of my parents was ill, or someone from next door to say Silver had had an accident. I jumped up, in the absence of any sort of dressing gown threw the bed quilt around me, and called out, “Come in, come in,” and “I’m coming.”

It couldn’t be Selina but it was. She had a hangover, there were pouches under her eyes and red veins branching all over her round cheeks. But she was as beautifully dressed as ever, the pink pearls around her neck and in her ears. She looked at me as you might look at someone who has just kicked you hard on the shin for no reason, with disbelief, bewilderment, and pain.

“Oh, Clodagh.”

I didn’t connect her tone with the missing money. Not then. I simply supposed I must have done some awful thing, or awful in her eyes and Max’s, been seen by one of their friends smoking in the street, or holding hands with Silver, or burying my poor cat.

“What’s the matter?” I said, preparing to defend myself.

“Max wants to see you. Now. He hasn’t had his breakfast yet, he couldn’t eat, he says.” I hadn’t had mine either. It was only eight o’clock in the morning. “It was as much as we could do to entertain our guests last night. And as for food, it would have choked us. I drank too much, of course. I had to.” She had never uttered so many sentences to me without the “darling” inserted. “He’s in the drawing room. Please go up at once, will you?”

I had come a long way since last October. “I’ll have a bath and dress first,” I said. I did and I took my time. Not without great anxiety, of course, and not without some self-reproach. I had constantly to remind myself, I did so every day, that Max had let me have this place rent-free. It was because I lived there that I had met Silver, and Silver was my treasure, the most important person in my life, the only one who could have taken Daniel’s place and more. All this had happened through Max. He was concerned about my welfare, he was even now, or so I supposed, doing his best to find a university course for me that I might like the sound of and want to take. I ought to be grateful and I was. But I also felt there was no reason to treat me like a bad child showing early symptoms of psychopathy.