We made it up the next day. He said he was sorry he had read the letter, he knew it was an awful thing to do, and I explained it was so unimportant to me that I had no interest in who read it. I hadn’t even done so myself for ages.

It wasn’t one of my Houghton days, so I sat down and wrote to Guy, saying no to his proposal and that it might be best if we didn’t see each other again. I offered to show the letter to Silver who said I was like a Victorian bride, writing to former suitors under her husband’s instructions, and refused to look at it.

“Come up on the roof,” he said.

We climbed out of the window. Dusk was violet-colored and warm, untouched as yet by any chill of autumn. We spread the blanket we had brought with us on the slates and sat side by side up against the chimney stack, watching the lights go on across west London and the aircraft cross the darkening sky, like meteorites homing on Heathrow. I said that we had made it up, and so we had. Each had forgiven the other but not forgotten. The roof at twilight was our place of romance as others might have some restaurant or beauty spot where they had been happy. We made it up but things were not the same.

That, of course, doesn’t necessarily have a forlorn meaning. For me, with the quarrel and the hard things that were said (harder, I think, than I can now remember), the innocence had gone out of our relationship. Perhaps it was also the case for him, but I could no longer delude myself that I read his mind and guessed his thoughts. That had gone too. Perhaps it was only that we had grown up a little more but in a leap and a bound instead of at the usual gradual pace. Eve looked on Adam as a god when she first came to Eden. “He for God only, she for God in him,” Silver once said to me, quoting something. But I think that after they were turned out of the garden in disgrace, their life together became more real because there was no more illusion and she knew he was only a man. Silver was only a boy and I wasn’t sure if my love could withstand knowing that. He knew that another man had wanted me and thought that I had wavered, so that I was changed in his eyes.

But we were happy up on the roof, kissing and talking (and apologizing), and neither of us said a word about money, spending it, lending it, or trying to rid oneself of inheritances. And when it got very dark and we had smoked all our cigarettes we went back into the flat and to bed.