My consolation was that Judy could never accompany us onto the roofs. She was much too afraid of heights. But Silver had told her about the occupants of 4E Torrington Gardens, which I thought a risky thing to have done.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Judy’s all right. She won’t talk.”

“But why did you tell her?”

“Because she’s a friend of mine. Because I like her.”

“Because she used to be your girlfriend?”

“If you like,” he said, but in the distant tone he used when voicing his disapproval.

They were rather alike to look at, he and Judy. They might have been brother and sister. (How I wished they were.) She too was white-skinned and fair-haired, though her hair was darker than Silver’s. Their eyes were the same shade of bright silver-gray. And, what I found most deeply disquieting, she was Jewish. I hardly knew Silver’s parents then, I knew nothing of their views, but my imagination supplied a semiorthodox couple who expected their son not to “marry out,” who in the past had looked with favor on Judy and would like to do so again. Even her name seemed in her favor. In some feminist book I’d read while still at school, Judith was praised as a great heroine. “Strengthen me this day, O Lord God of Israel!” she cried as she plunged the sword into Holofernes. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t compete.

But she never came on the roofs with us. We left her behind to look after Liv, though the possible threat from Jonny seemed to grow less every day. And up there we were united again, close again. Because crossing the burned roof had made us nervous that first time, we hadn’t tried it again but, in the third week of August, on an evening when we had nothing to carry to 4E, we decided to make another attempt. The masonry was warm to touch, although the sun was now gone, and the slates under our feet were dry and smooth, not at all slippery. No rain had fallen for so long that drifts of pale dry dust lay in the guttering inside the parapet. An early drop, heralding that later fall two months off, had shed leaves from the plane trees and some had blown up here. They lay on the tarpaulin, yellow-green, shriveled, but still as big as dinner plates.