That was the beginning of it. I had never done anything about it and no one had ever shown much interest. All Dad wanted to do was forget, and when I told Mum she thought I was exaggerating. But really, what could they have done? Did they even know I had a phobia about enclosed spaces? For one thing, the Suffolk countryside is probably one of the best places on earth to be a claustrophobic, except for the Sahara Desert. It’s all wide open spaces, huge fields, enormous skies, flat land, level horizons. Apart from seaside resorts, there must be more bungalows in Suffolk than anywhere in the British Isles, and you seldom find an ordinary house more than two stories high. There may be underpasses beneath a few big roads, but I’d never seen them. I’d never seen caves either or houses with cellars. Our house was all on two floors with big picture windows and my school was a modern building mostly made of glass. The world there was a claustrophobic’s paradise. And suddenly I was in Russia Road, having arrived after a terrible journey through tunnels, to find myself doomed to live for three years, a lifetime when you’re nineteen, in a place where very little light ever came and no window’s top reached even as far as street level.

Max’s grandmother had lived down there. He told me so while we had supper. As soon as he could afford it, he bought the house and moved her into the basement from the place she lived in near Paddington Station, a Victorian cottage that was damp and subsiding and due to be demolished. After his father had left home and his mother died, she had brought him up in that house and made many sacrifices for him so that he could have his chance of a good education. Here Max, being Max, couldn’t resist saying that of course he won scholarships and that helped. His grandmother was very old when he brought her to Russia Road and past ninety when she died.

“She didn’t actually die downstairs, if that’s what you’re thinking, darling,” Selina said. “She doesn’t haunt the place.”

I hadn’t supposed she did. That would have been the least of my worries. Max looked pained, as if suggesting that coming back as a ghost was an insult to old Mrs. Fisherton’s memory, as perhaps it was.

“All the furniture was hers,” he said fondly. “I’ve kept it just as she left it.”