Perhaps it was better than Jonny expected. Silver and I went into our room for a while, leaving them to work this out alone. Liv told me the next day that Jonny had said that when she came she could bring the £2,000 as her contribution to “household expenses.” It sounded more as if he was planning to set up some sort of suburban establishment rather than the more sinister arrangement I had imagined. She told him the money was gone, the mugger took it when he hit her father and fractured his skull. Jonny, who knew more than she guessed, said her father hadn’t been carrying the money and where was it? Liv denied any knowledge of it, said she was resigned now to its loss. She thought Jonny would “try to fuck me” but he didn’t. She used the word, as many of our contemporaries did, in its correct sense and as part of ordinary conversation, but with her it carried no force, no self-consciousness or weight of associations, so that it sounded almost shocking coming out in that accent from those pretty pink lips.

He and she finished the wine and had a couple of whiskeys each. This sent Liv back to sleep. Jonny was gone by the time we came out of our room. He never worried about driving when about ten times over the limit. He’d told Liv before he left that he was going to begin “house-hunting.” Silver phoned Morna and asked if we could come over. There was something we’d like to discuss with her.

She shared a flat with three other girls in a Whitechapel back street. I had never been there before. The flat wasn’t in one of the tiny terraced houses, now preserved and, for all I know, listed, but in a faceless sixties redbrick block, of which there were many in the area. I don’t know if it belonged to a college or if they rented it privately. I was more concerned about the means of getting there. Silver, knowing the way I was—how could he forget, he said, considering the way we met on the best day of his life?—had already planned the three buses we must take. So it would take a long time? We had all the time in the world until Exodus Day One.

Morna insisted we have supper. It was a rich vegetable-laden beef stew and the first red meat, almost the first meat, I’d eaten since I’d last gone out to dinner with Guy in March. Two of Morna’s flatmates were out and the other was in her room among her biochemistry books. She said she’d willingly drive Silver and Jason to Heathrow, and if she couldn’t borrow her mother’s car she’d hire one. That was something we had never thought of, hiring a car. But she had a better idea.

“Why don’t I take him to Sydney?”