“Who’s this M. R. Silverman?” he said.

“Me, of course.”

Silver realized then. He was going to explain, would have done so, but for the gasp that came from Alison. She stood up. I thought she was going to fall and I jumped up myself, to seize her by the arm. She stood as still as a statue, looking at Silver, and he, as he had been doing a few moments before, looked at her.

“You have seen the birds before,” she said in a thin, remote voice, quite unlike her usual rich tone. “And you’ve seen me before. Oh, Michael, don’t you remember?”

Chapter 32

32

WE WENT HOME AT last, forgetful of Vivien Nyland. No doubt she was asleep. It was two in the morning. The lamps were out, no one was in the streets and all was as silent as the countryside but for the hum from the arterial roads. Silver looked very pale in the light of our hall, even paler than usual. His hands were icy to the touch.

“How long have you known?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Not to say known. I had a feeling sometimes, a kind of déjà vu. When you took the broken bits of the little bird out of your jeans pocket, I was really upset. I had that sort of sensation of the sun going in, do you know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“Jeans pockets have got a lot to answer for.”

We went upstairs and straight into our bedroom. We lay on the bed. “And then when Andrew talked about Diana, said that Alison’s mother was called Diana, I was nearly sure. I didn’t want to be. I suppose I realized then that I didn’t want to know who’d abducted me.”

“The ship in the bottle?” I said.

“I told you I had this memory of a boat. Because it was on the coast, it was the seaside, everyone thought that meant I’d been taken somewhere in a boat. Small children talk about boats, not ships, but what I remembered was that ship in a bottle.”

The china birds, Alison said, they had brought with them from their home because they were home to her. It upset her a lot when one of them was broken. The ship in the bottle she hadn’t seen for years until she saw it again here, in 4E, on a shelf in the bedroom that was to be Jason’s. She liked to believe Louis Robinson had put it in there for Jason, but probably that was only wishful thinking. Her mother had given it to Louis’s late wife Helen on one of her visits to London because Helen had admired it on one of her visits to Cornwall. It was here that Andrew had interrupted. I realized then that he hadn’t known, that Alison had never told him. Had she thought he wouldn’t understand?