We sat down on the stairs between the third floor and the fourth. My thoughts went back to a year past and I remembered how I had felt like that, not first with anyone. With Daniel gone and my parents so condemnatory, I’d thought everyone had someone they loved more than me. Even with Guy Wharton, who was kind to me, I could never have said I came first in his thoughts and heart. I put my arms around Liv and hugged her. Presently we started up the stairs again and once we were in the flat and she’d gone to her room, I told Silver about Jonny’s rapist activities. He knocked on Liv’s door.

“I can’t keep him out of here, Liv,” he said. “He’s got a key. And if he hadn’t, he’d use the window. I’m sorry about this, I know how it sounds.” It was useless telling her to call the police and complain of rape, he had said to me. They’d want her to go to the police station with them, go to the rape crisis center. “I’ll have a locksmith round to put a lock on your door. I don’t believe Jonny would break the door down.”

I’ve sometimes reflected since then that almost every helpful suggestion made to Liv she rejected. Oh, no, she couldn’t lock her door. There might be a fire. She might lose the key. It was my opinion, later confided to Silver, that in locking Jonny out she feared she’d also lock Wim out. Poor Silver was beginning to feel his nonpaying tenants a great trouble to him. It comes very hard on young people when they have a sneaking suspicion their elders may have been right all along. Apparently his father had warned him, when letting him have the flat, that while having a girlfriend to stay with him was all very well (Jack Silverman, though cranky, was an enlightened man), bringing home dubious homeless pals might be a mistake.

“My chickens are coming home to roost,” Silver said, “though why that should be a hardship I don’t know. I’d have thought one would have wanted one’s chickens at home, not laying eggs for someone else.”

“Your chickens don’t lay any eggs,” I said. “They just peck each other to bits.”

He laughed and said to Liv, who had listened to this exchange with angry suspicion, that the best solution was for her to persevere with her therapy so that she could get herself back into the outside world. Even if the £2,000 was lost, he had her airfare in his bank account, and she should get back to Sweden as soon as possible.

“My money is not lost. My money will come back to me.”

It seemed doubtful.

“You don’t want me here,” she said dolefully.