For poor Elsie this was an impossible situation. She eyed the room we were in, turning her head and swiveling her eyes, with an expression of pained dismay. What Elsie saw must have made her feel far worse than when she set out with her daughter’s address and her London guide. I don’t know that there were actually any mouse droppings on the ancient, greasy, gray, worn, and deeply stained carpet, but there may have been. Cigarette ash sprinkled the top of every surface. Every chair had its woodwork scuffed and its upholstery threadbare, while the sofa might, if the vendor was lucky, have fetched £5 if sold from a Church Street pavement. The wallpaper was coming off, and one evening Wim had hastened its disintegration by peeling quite a large area off in strips. At the open windows the high wind that had sprung up blew the frayed and dirty curtains out almost horizontally and tumbled onto the floor a week’s accumulated newspapers.

Elsie couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head and shutting her eyes in despair. Judy and Morna came up the stairs, Silver came out from his bedroom, while she gazed, aghast. The next thing will be Wim arriving through the window, I thought. But he didn’t come, and gradually Elsie seemed to take comfort from Silver’s presence, accepting a cup of tea from his hands (and sending it back because it had milk in it) and at last taking her eyes off her daughter.

It was hoped her husband would be discharged from the hospital in two days’ time. She managed to say this in quite good English, while apologizing all the time for her failure to master this phrase or that. Her husband and she would go back to Sweden very soon. She was due to return to work the following Monday.

“We will go back and we will bring Liv with us. That is the best way.”

By then Liv was looking drowsy. She quite often fell asleep in the middle of the day with conversation going on all around her. But her mother’s words electrified her. She leapt up off the sofa, stood there, convulsed like someone on TV who has been shot and at any moment will fall, and began shouting at her mother in Swedish. No one could understand a word but we all knew what she was saying: she wouldn’t go, she was unable even to go outside, and someone had taken her money. At least she had stopped accusing her father of stealing it.

Summoning up what English she could remember from her school days, Elsie threatened Liv with the law. “I will ask a policeman to come here and make you.”