He was barely conscious but perhaps this was only sleep, for he stirred after we had been sitting by his bed for a while, put out a hand and touched mine, feeling for it as if he were blind and then clutching it in a surprisingly strong grip. He wasn’t blind but he kept his eyes closed on that visit. Silver said afterward it may have been because he feared to see what had been done to him, didn’t even want to see the outline of the cradle that kept the bedclothes from touching his leg. No one would tell us anything. We weren’t relatives. I wished I had said I was his sister but it was too late for that. A staff nurse wanted to know where his next of kin were. Had he a wife? Had he parents? We knew so little, though Wim’s having a wife seemed most unlikely.

The events of the night before, that terrible night and what had happened to Wim—not to mention Liv’s disappearance—almost drove the inhabitants of 4E Torrington Gardens from our minds. They didn’t need us, they were well supplied with provisions, and all was in place for the Exodus. I believe we had entirely forgotten about the Nylands, that couple who lived in the middle of the house and who had turned out to be so much younger than we had expected. Our heads were full of Wim and Jonny and, to a lesser extent, Liv. We spent a long time when we got back from the hospital speculating as to what the relations between those three had really been. Liv had seemed passionately in love with Wim, but could she have loved him and not even gone to see him when he lay ill and so fearfully injured? Had he come to love her? Or was there no more between them than an obsessive lust? Jonny’s act must have been motivated by jealousy. Because he loved Liv? Or had he only felt that he owned her, that she was his possession no one else might touch? And was he envious of Wim because, apart from Liv’s preference for him, he was tall and graceful and handsome and, in his own odd way, charming?