So much for the openness and frankness of young people, the absence of jealousy and recrimination in their liberated lives. So much for their new attitude to sex, suspicion fled and passion simplified. Silver and I slept in the same bed and sometimes made love, though as I imagine middle-aged people, tired of a long marriage and of each other, make it. Dutifully, almost sadly, a simple preface to sleep.

Sometimes I thought that all that held us together was our determination to do what we could for the escape of Andrew, Alison, and Jason, to carry out the plan we were formulating. And I remembered with sadness Silver’s talk of marriage as we walked the canal bank and our love-making that warm evening on the roof.

Chapter 26

26

AUGUST CAME TO AN end and on its final day a newspaper carried a big story about Andrew and Alison and Jason. We had taken little notice of the recent accounts of sightings. This story was different. This time a woman who lived in Inverness Terrace had told the police and the newspaper she had seen Andrew shopping in Westbourne Grove.

If you get there by way of the underpass, the one where I was so frightened and where I met Silver, Westbourne Grove is about half a mile from Torrington Gardens. This was serious, this was getting very near home. But Andrew had stayed in since we had started fetching things in for them. Or had he?

The scaffolding between Peterborough Avenue and the first terrace in Torrington Gardens was still there, though the redecoration was long finished and the new paint already spattered with pigeon droppings. Though this seemed unlikely, we wondered with optimism if the removal of the scaffolding and repair of the burned roof might coincide.

Jason was once more on the balcony waiting for us. I put my arms around him and he kissed me soundly on both cheeks. At the moment all was well enough, he was hidden behind a screen of leaves, but in autumn when they fell the people in the houses opposite would be able to see him. I had failed to understand then what risks prisoners will take for a glimpse of liberty, a breath of air, a sight of sky not looked at through glass.

We had brought the newspaper with us and we showed it to Andrew, certain then that the woman who claimed to have seen him had just made a guess that was unlucky for them but a breakthrough for the police. He took a defiant stance. Yes, he had been out.