Wim’s attention to her and his love-making were the best therapy she could have had. Or so it seemed then, so it seemed. And when I took her downstairs—it would never have crossed his mind to do this—she took almost jaunty steps down the path, stood at the gate and looked quite boldly up and down the length of Russia Road.

“Soon I am walking in the street, Clodagh.”

I said optimistically that this meant she’d soon be able to go home to Sweden.

“That is a possibility, yes, but I don’t think so. Better Wim and I go somewhere away from here, a long long way, and get work and are happy.”

Very unlikely, as far as Wim was concerned. I tried to imagine him in a domestic situation, being a breadwinner, or even half of a breadwinning couple, having an ordinary conversation, eating proper meals, watching television. I tried and failed.

That was the day, according to my diary, meticulously kept at this time, that Silver saw Jonny. He saw him in a street off the Holloway Road where he had gone to buy something for Andrew Lane, an attachment for the shower at 4E, something that couldn’t be found nearer home. Jonny was coming down the front steps of a shabby gray house in a terrace of such houses in a street without trees or anything green and where the front gardens were full of dustbins and chained-up bicycles. Silver called out something, hi or hello, but Jonny wouldn’t look at him and passed him by as if they had never met before.

“Did he look prosperous?”

“Not so’s you’d notice. It’s not very salubrious where he’s living, if he’s living there, not what your mum and my mum would call ‘a nice part.’ ”

I said that perhaps it was just as well Jonny had ignored him. He had said himself, I pointed out, that it would have been better for everyone if he had never been friends with someone like Jonny and invited him into his home.

“He’s not ‘someone like,’ he’s himself.” Silver’s tone was cold and remote. “And it’s not the way I want to be, only knowing respectable people.”

His coldness I attributed to the presence of Judy in the flat, although she had been absent since the night we began on our Andrew and Alison exit plan. I didn’t know, he never said a word at that time, that it was Guy Wharton coming between us, that Silver was beginning to believe I was deceiving him with Guy. And it wasn’t only that Lucy, coming around with Tom while I was at work, had told him, perhaps with no malice, that she had seen me kissing Guy that morning in the Warwick Avenue gardens after we had met at the nursery. There was more to it than that.