Young people feel enormously magnanimous and kind when they go home to visit their parents. I still feel a bit that way, though it’s now something I sternly repress. I had been regularly speaking on the phone to Mum, and Dad too when he was at home or it wasn’t news time. They had my phone number at Silver’s and somehow they had learned the address. From Guy, was my guess. I had been intending to go home for a long time. You’ll have realized what stopped me, that the major stumbling block was how to get to Liverpool Street Station. Nothing would have got me down into that tube again and a taxi costing £15 was beyond my means. In the end I took the No. 6 bus to Oxford Street and the No. 8 from there to Liverpool Street. It took nearly an hour.

More buses at the other end. A taxi there would have been far more than £15. The third bus dropped me in our village four hours after I had left Silver’s and I was very late for Mum’s lunch. Conversation at first centered on the extraordinary circumstance of my still living in Russia Road and only next door but one to Max. This led to a digression on the subject of Max. Mum was sure he must be ill, possibly mentally ill—she subscribes to the ancient theory of psychiatric problems being the result of overloading the brain—but even that could hardly excuse accusing me of theft and being an accomplice to murder and turning me out of the house. I was quite willing to talk about this for as long as they liked. It postponed what I had to tell them, what I had really come here to tell them. The moment wasn’t long delayed.

Dad began bemoaning the fact that I’d dropped out of GUP. I had told them I was working. Working at what? I took a deep breath, said I was living with my boyfriend and had a job as a part-time gardener.