“Nice smell,” she said while we had our tea. “I like a place to smell of cigarettes, it reminds me of my late husband. I don’t smoke myself and nor do the two still at home. I’ve tried taking it up, mind, but it didn’t agree with me.” She sniffed appreciatively. “Don’t you let the Professor catch you.” She always called Max “the Professor.” Presumably he had asked her to, or Selina had. “He’s a raving fanatic when it comes to smoking.”

“I know,” I said. “He said I wasn’t to smoke in here.”

“Girls will be girls is what I always say.”

It may have been that time or on her next visit that she remarked on the dim lighting. “Not very cheerful down here, is it, love? You’ll ruin your eyes, reading your college books.”

I seldom did read them, but I wasn’t going to say so. I asked her what I could do about the light and she looked warily at me, the way you look at a person in the street who’s gesticulating or talking to himself. “You need stronger bulbs, don’t you? Like hundreds, not forties. It’ll be an outlay but worth it, I reckon.”

I could get them around the corner, she said, at a store which had some fancy name but which everyone called “Superglue”—a title instigated originally by Beryl, I expect—and that same day I did. She showed me how to put them in the lamp sockets. A couple of months ago I showed my gratitude (for that and a thousand other things) by rewiring the flat she had recently bought from the council. The 100-watt bulbs made a great difference to old Mrs. Fisherton’s and if I still felt enclosed and oppressed, the breathlessness and the sensation of the ceiling sinking and crushing me were less bad.

Beryl lived in a tower block on the Harrow Road and a son and a daughter lived with her. Neither of them could be induced to take up cigarette smoking, for as with their mother it didn’t agree with them. Her son was an electrician and her daughter sold cosmetics in one of the Oxford Street stores. Beryl had made a corner for herself in Russia Road, cleaning for Max and Selina and the people at Nos. 13, 15, and 17.

“Those Silvermans,” she said, “they only come up for a weekend and not many weekends in a year. The place is like a palace, never a fingermark, I don’t know why they keep it on, really.”

I asked her where they lived in the country and she told me. Did she mean No. 15 was empty most of the time?

“Barring the top flat, love. Their son’s up there, him and I don’t know who else, half a dozen of them if you ask me. He gets rid of them or maybe he hides them under the beds when his mum and dad come but that’s only once in a blue moon.”