Max is dead now. He has been dead for three years. After Selina left him, perhaps I should say was forced to leave him, when he brought his lover into their home, after what’s usually called an “acrimonious” divorce, 19 Russia Road was sold and the proceeds divided between them. Max bought a little house in a Bayswater mews and married the woman he had been living with, and it was there I went one evening to have dinner with them. By that time we were on friendly if guarded terms. A ring main on the ground floor failed while I was there and I was able, to my great pleasure and with a certain secret triumph, to find the fault and put things right. Max was astounded. Thanking me, he said I obviously had intelligence and what a pity it was I had made so few intellectual demands on it. Six months afterward he was dead.

As for Selina, she never remarried. I sometimes read about her in the papers, in the gossip columns or diary notes. The profile some journalist did of her for The Times last year mentioned a partner, so she’s not alone in the hi-tech ultramodern flat she’s bought in Docklands. Streetwise is of course still running and likely to run for many years.

When I went back into their house that morning, I thought that not only was I descending the iron staircase and entering old Mrs. Fisherton’s for the last time, but that this would be the last time I’d speak to Max and Selina. I never imagined—how could I?—that I’d go to Max’s new home and, ultimately, visit him in the hospital when he was on his deathbed. Nor that Selina and I would regularly exchange Christmas cards and that she, unable to accept the invitation to my wedding, would send me a handsome present of the most expensive kind of food mixer. No, that morning, I thought I was turning my back on them and the house forever.

Feeling no animosity toward Mabel Fisherton herself, though I wished she had furnished her flat more cheerfully, I said goodbye to her and, when I had taken my clothes off them, jangled the wire hangers in her wardrobe for the final time. If her namesake had lived, what would I be doing about her? I’d have found a way, I thought, and wished I had a sweet cat to take away with me. When I had packed my case and Dad’s trunk I went upstairs to look for my landlords, if people can be landlords when you aren’t paying them.