It was my idea to try asking Selina if she knew anything about the actor. Silver agreed, though he was surprised that I was willing to renew contact with her and Max. But I was changing, and with the rapid progress that happens when one is twenty. Whatever I may have told myself about my feelings, I realized that I had been afraid of Max. He had embodied all the authoritarian figures I’d ever known. Selina hadn’t frightened me, but all the time I was with her I used to feel alienated and confused, as if I was trying to understand a foreign language spoken by someone who could have talked English if she had chosen to.

Should I try to avoid Max? I was no longer up early enough to call at the house while he went out for his morning run. Besides, even if I stirred myself and managed to be outside by seven, Selina would still be in bed and would look less than kindly on someone who fetched her to the door in a dressing gown and without her makeup. I decided I’d have to brave Max and face the consequences. I bundled up our dirty clothes into a pillowcase for Silver to take to the launderette and I went out into the street just before ten. But as I looked across at No. 19 from the top of our steps, something it was quite possible to do above the low porch walls and between the narrow pillars, I saw an astonishing sight. A woman in a blue tracksuit was coming up the area staircase. She paused at the top to close and fasten the gate just as Max, in his chocolate running gear, came out of the front door. The woman was my former supervisor, Caroline Bodmer.

They met on the path and kissed. Max held the street gate open for her and the two of them set off at a jog trot in the direction of Paddington Recreation Ground. No doubt on her account, Max had changed his exercise time. What I had seen gave me much to think about. Certain unexplained remarks of Selina’s fell into place. I understood her reference to “scruffy academics.” I watched Max and Caroline Bodmer disappear around the corner into Lauderdale Road—they hadn’t once looked in my direction—and walked around to No. 19. Selina opened the door so quickly she must have been standing just inside it. Her face was grim, more lined than I had ever seen it, the makeup on her skin like plaster applied with a trowel. She wore a skimpy silk suit in that hardest of all colors to wear, lemon yellow, and a lot of gold jewelry.

“Come in,” she said, in the voice of an undertaker talking to the bereaved. “I suppose you saw them?”

“I’d no idea she was his girlfriend.”