I had a good enough time but I don’t really know why I went. Because I was invited? Because I was lonely? These last few weeks, only three now, are dragging badly. When my husband comes home I should throw a great party to welcome him, Junilla says. She’d have a party every weekend if it was practicable. But I don’t want anyone there but me when he comes home. I’m hungry to see him. It’s as if my eyes ache from not seeing him. I devote a lot of mind-space between working and writing this to imagining the cab bringing him home draw up down there on the drive-in and to seeing him get out and pay the man and carry his bags. I ought to go down and help him up with them but I don’t—in my vision of this, I mean—but I wait here to hear the faint slithering hiss of the lift as it brings him up to the penthouse floor. The doors slide open and click shut behind him, and then he comes to this door, his bags bumping and sliding, and I hear his key turn in the lock.

“Hiss” is Swedish for a lift. Niall said it must be an onomatopoeia, a term I’d never heard until he brought it out, the word echoing the sound a lift makes. But Liv, who had used it, saying ungratefully that 15 Russia Road was impossible without a “hiss,” insisted that it came from the old Norse.

“What, those old Vikings had lifts? In their ships maybe?”

Liv didn’t much like Niall. She said he was always picking on her. And it’s true he was a pedantic person, always saying things like “It all depends on what you mean by so-and-so,” and “Can you define that?” He’s a professor of something or other now at one of those universities that come very high up the league tables. But at that time he was a spotty boy with red hair who boasted that he passed his exams without doing any work. I suppose he fancied Liv. They say that men who trump up arguments with women and are critical of their appearance and way of life are really attracted by them. Perhaps Niall was. At any rate, he took over my job of escorting Liv downstairs for her therapy walk, though bullying her in a whiny voice and nagging her to do better. The walk now extended as far as 7 Russia Road, which was in the next terrace. Liv probably walked a yard more every day, but she wouldn’t cross the road. She had some idea that a favorite contract-killing method was to run the victim over. James and Claudia, in her feverish imagination, were just the kind of people to employ a hitman in a big Mercedes.