Frowning, he said, “Are you saying your mother abducted a three-year-old? Just snatched him and took him away?”

“Like we abducted Jason.” She nodded. “Snatched him and took him away.”

“That’s quite different and you know it.”

“Is it? As I see it, it’s the same woman desperate for a child.” She gave a deep sigh. “Not my mother, Andrew, me. I abducted Michael. That was what he told me he was called, Michael.”

He looked at her and his face underwent a radical, dreadful change. He aged years in a moment. “I don’t believe it. You’re mad. This place has driven you mad.”

I saw that an abyss had opened between those two, and though I longed to know the rest of the story, the why and the how, I was afraid of the explosion that might ensue if any more at all was said. Yet more had to be said. Silver sat silently, leaning forward, his head bent and his elbows on his knees. The lamp-light gleamed on his thatch of pale hair. I noticed he had clenched his fists. To stop himself trembling? I had seldom before seen my calm and steady Silver so affected. Alison saw it too and a great tenderness came into her face. It was the way she sometimes looked at Jason.

Outside, down in the street, an ambulance siren began to howl. Andrew went to the window and shut it with a slam. The room shook. “I don’t understand.” His voice was cold. “I’d like you to explain.”

“I knew I’d have to one day,” Alison said. “I knew there’d be a day of reckoning. Well, it’s a night, isn’t it? This is the night.”

Silver looked up. The way he spoke was quite unlike his usual light and pleasant tone. “Go on, please. I want to know.”

She glanced at me, I don’t know why, perhaps because I was the only other woman there. She got up and sat in one of the straight-backed chairs at the table. Perhaps she needed to sit upright while she told us. “You said I was mad. I suppose I was—then. I was twenty-three. I was only eighteen when I got married. Charles Barrie was fifteen years older than me, but that didn’t make him so very old. He left me after four years, he said he couldn’t stand me always going on about wanting a baby. He said I didn’t talk about anything else. Even our love-making, he said, I only wanted so that I could have a baby.”