No one had cleaned up the drawing room after the party. Sticky glasses stood about, a full ashtray overflowed onto a black and gilt ormolu table and someone had spilled syrupy orange liquid on the emerald carpet. It made a livid patch of what looked like an ineradicable stain. Max in sepulchral black tracksuit—a kind of mourning assumed for me?—was sitting in an armchair, one of the uncomfortable kind upholstered in shiny satin. In front of him stood a round table and on the table was Liv’s money laid out in ten neat piles, rather like cards for a game of patience. He looked happy, pleased with himself, and several years younger than when I had last seen him. But the voice in which he spoke to me was deep, heavy, and loaded with doom.

“Sit down, please, Clodagh. Sit down over there.”

“Over there” was another satin armchair, but chestnut brown instead of yellow. I felt something sticking in my side and pulled out from underneath me a silver cigarette holder from which, into my hand, trickled a little stream of black tar.

“Oh, put it down, put it down,” said Max.

I laid it on the table a few inches from the notes and, in the absence of anything else to do, wiped my hand on my jeans. Max stared as if he had never before seen such a disgusting act. There was silence now of the kind that is always intended to intimidate the accused, to force them to ask what’s the matter. I looked at Max, I looked at the money, I did what the silence expected of me. “What is it?”

“Can you think,” said Max, “of any reason why I shouldn’t call the police?”

I couldn’t. “I’d like to say something,” I said.

I spoke slowly because I was quaking inside and if my hands began to tremble I didn’t want him to see. I closed my fists, something which always looks aggressive, though it may be a defense measure. “You very kindly let me have the flat and you let me have it for free, but I don’t think that should mean I don’t have any right to privacy. I’m over eighteen, I’m grown up, I ought to be able to keep things in the place where I live without other people”—I nearly said snooping—“looking for them and taking—taking them away.”

It wasn’t very well put. Max’s lips twitched. Inwardly he was laughing at my inability to be articulate, to find the cogent phrase. But in the same cold tone he told me I’d abrogated—that was the word he used—my right to privacy through my behavior. Instead of asking me where the money came from, he told me and then denied the implication.