Silver, who had only half an hour before been so certain of Jonny’s guilt, had now half-persuaded himself he was innocent, or innocent of this particular offense. And so we argued ourselves out of our strong belief. We did nothing. Jonny was somewhere, probably still in London, but we’d no idea where. Liv was still in the flat and likely to remain there perhaps, as she’d said, “for years and years.” Three days later, Håkan Almquist was allowed to go home to Stockholm and thence to Kiruna.

Wim too had apparently vanished. The pattern of occupation of the flat was changing. A friend of Morna’s called Niall, a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, had also come to stay. Failing to persuade Silver to let her have Jonny’s room, Judy camped in the living room. I tried very hard not to mind Judy’s being there, but I did mind.

I’ve heard older people say that my generation, born in the late sixties and early seventies, is the first to grow up free from sexual guilt and sexual pressures. We don’t need to clock up a lot of partners, we don’t need the experience that comes from variety. Free to enter a relationship without shame and without concealment, we are open about our sex lives and frank with each other about our feelings. Jealousy is absent and so is subterfuge. The notion of passion being heightened by tension and danger is foreign to us. In the age of AIDS we accept a full and rewarding sex life with just one person without covert longings or secret desires. All I can say is, I haven’t noticed it. No one I know is like that and I’m not myself, though we might wish to be. As everyone, I imagine, since the world began has wished to be.

So Judy’s occasional presence in the flat was a cloud across the sky of my sunny days, as Wim’s had been across Jonny’s. And although I never knew it till the end, my presence was a threat to Liv, for she feared Wim’s obvious fondness for me, as Guy’s very existence was to Silver. None of us brought these things out into the open. We never discussed them. They festered and oozed inside us. Particularly bad for me were the days when Judy spent the night in the flat, on the living-room floor, and was still there when I had to go off to work at the Houghtons’. As I mowed the lawn and deadheaded the dahlias, I’d imagine her and Silver sitting there talking about old times (those were the days and do you remember?), unchaperoned, Liv locked in her room fast asleep. And that week Silver never once came to Randolph Avenue to collect me at the end of my day’s work.