The black-and-white television held my attention for about half an hour. Sitting down for longer than that became unpleasant, so I walked about, looking into the two rooms I was never to use, a spare bedroom and a dining room with no window at all, only a string you pulled to set a fan going. That dim and shadowy cavern with prints on the walls of ancient manor houses and ships in storms at sea, a large square table and eight bow-legged chairs, a sideboard and an old metal trolley stacked with apparently an entire green and gold porcelain dinner service, I resolved never in any circumstances to enter again. Things might have been very different if I’d kept to that resolution and not hidden Liv’s money in the sideboard drawer. I should have locked the door and thrown away the key, only there was no key. I was breathing rather quickly and shallowly when I came out, catching my breath and very nearly sobbing. That evening—and it was probably the very worst of all the evenings—I asked myself what I was going to do, how was I going to handle things, how was I going to stand it?

When we get older one of the things we learn is that things change. Hardly anything stays the same. If old Mrs. Fisherton’s didn’t change, I would and my circumstances would, but I was only nineteen and a very young nineteen, in spite of the life-transforming experience I’d had. Max and Selina shouldn’t have treated me the way they did but, on the other hand, they’d let me have a large flat rent-free in a highly sought-after part of London and quite near the college I was going to. The flat had been got ready, was clean and had clean sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom. I see it that way now but I didn’t then. I don’t mean I thought they had treated me badly, I didn’t, but I felt ill-used by some disembodied fate and I felt afraid.

Fortunately, I suppose, I was so ignorant of any sort of household management that when I went into the kitchen I didn’t notice there was no fridge and no machines for washing clothes or dishes. My eyes focused fearfully on the gas oven and the electric ring with an old blackened kettle standing on it. I had never in my life cooked anything, I had never made a cup of tea, though I had—and to this accomplishment I clung as to a lifeline— poured boiling water onto a spoonful of powdered coffee in a mug.