Silver hadn’t returned. I didn’t expect him for a long while. Judy said let’s go around to the Robert Browning or the Warrington Hotel and take Wim with us. But he was evidently behind that closed door in bed with Liv, so we went alone. Max and Caroline Bodmer were at a table outside the Warrington but once they had seen me they left quickly. We stayed until the pub shut and went home slowly through the warm streets, making a diversion to the canal to watch the dine-and-dance boat go by, its colored lights glittering, its music drifting across the water.

“I really fancy that Sean,” Judy said. “It’s not going to be a punishment getting to know him better.”

Five years later she married him, and when I last heard they had two babies and were very happy, but that was all unthought of then. Silver came home in the small hours, I think it was about three. He sat on the bed and told me in a tired voice—or was he just tired of me?—that he had seen Jonny and got a promise from him to produce three passports.

Chapter 27

27

WHEN HE GOT THERE Jonny was out. The house was a warren of single rented rooms. No one living there knew where he was or when he’d be back, but several confirmed that he was a tenant. Silver sat down on the wall outside to wait for him. The neighborhood, not far from Holloway prison, was very different from ours. Not so many people owned cars but everyone seemed to want to be out in the streets, either walking about or sitting on their front doorsteps. The night was warm for early September but the sky overcast and the atmosphere sultry as if a storm threatened. Men’s shouts and women’s shrieks, which always seem to start when darkness comes, had begun and bursts of rock music thudded out of passing cars, their windows open or their roofs down. Silver told me all this as if I didn’t know it already or as if there was no one there and he was talking to himself.

He kept his eyes turned away. I suddenly understood that he was deeply unhappy, but when I put out my hand to touch his hand he withdrew it. He had sat in the corner café opposite and drank coffee. Tiredness had come over him and he needed something to keep him awake. Jonny came when he was on the point of giving up. The café had closed and he was back on the wall, almost stunned by the volume of someone’s music belting out of an open window behind him. It was ten to one.