I saw that she was afraid to go. More than that, she wanted to remain where she was. It was too big a step, they had suffered enough, the venture might fail and all be lost. Here they were safe. Departing was to come to the edge of the abyss and leap blindfolded. I looked at Alison’s face and thought, you won’t sleep much till September 18th, you’ll lie awake worrying all those nights between now and then.

“Does he, I mean Jason, does he have to go with you?” she asked.

Silver said those words we should be very careful about saying, the words that make too enormous a promise unless we’re absolutely confident we can fulfill it. “Trust me.”

“I trust you. I’m only saying you ought to know how hard it will be for me to—well, surrender Jason into your hands.”

“Think about it less melodramatically,” Silver said. “Better still, don’t think about it. Don’t let it bother you. Leave it to us. I’ll book the flights, I’ll buy the tickets.”

Andrew made no move. As I have said, we had no idea where they kept their hoard except that it wasn’t in that room. Unless it was in the table drawer, but all that had seemed to contain was their passports. A memory came back to me from five or six years before. A man, a former friend of my father’s, had come to our house ostensibly to repay a loan. Dad had lent him £1,000. He stayed for hours, he drank tea, he ate biscuits, he drank gin and tonic, beer, and at last got up to go without mentioning the loan. He was halfway to the door and then Dad had to speak, embarrassed, hating it, saying what I now said.

“You owe us some money.”

“All right, all right. I was going to give you something.” Andrew sounded quite irritable, as if we were beggars who had approached him in the street. “I’ll just remind you that we can’t earn, we don’t have jobs like you, we don’t have an income. What we have diminishes a bit every day. Even when we get to Australia these visas you’ve got us don’t entitle us to work. If we work, we’ll have to do it illegally.”

“You should be used to that,” I said. “You’ve been doing something illegal for seven months.”