We kissed him, Morna and I on the lips, Silver on his forehead. I felt near to tears as we walked down the hospital stairs. I had seen evil and its results and it was the first time I had seen it. What I had thought of as evil before was just ignorance and folly and failing to understand. That day before my wedding, when I saw Jonny at the wheel of that luscious car, I remembered the evil he had done and the tendency I had to smile at his success and inwardly congratulate him on pulling that flashy blonde, all that vanished in the smoke of his cigarette.

If the prisoners of 4E were satisfied with Morna as a courier and temporary guardian of Jason, they gave no sign of it. They shook hands with her, they thanked her in a perfunctory kind of way and, of course, offered her a glass of the wine we were all having. She was ebullient, full of enthusiasm for the task ahead, rapidly making friends with Jason, who took her by the hand to show her his room, his possessions, the ship in a bottle. Alison and Andrew were subdued. The atmosphere of a quarrel not long past was almost palpable in that room. Andrew was the kind of man who harbors a grudge. I thought he might hold what Alison had done against her forever. While Morna was out of the room she began talking once more about Diana Lomax, speaking in a low voice.

“My mother thought it a terrible misfortune that your father wouldn’t— well, let her go, Michael. She was afraid he’d somehow find Louis and Helen Robinson and get to know them and, through them, try to get closer to her. She’d been at school with Helen, they’d been friends forever, but after that day when your father wouldn’t be discouraged she said she’d never go and stay with the Robinsons again. She got paranoid about it, she thought she might meet him by chance in the street or meet him and your mother while she was out with Helen and Louis. I know your father meant well, Michael, but she saw it as persecution.”

“Would you mind calling me Silver, please? Everyone does.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course.” After that she went back to doing what she had done before, calling him nothing. I had seen him wince every time she had used his first name. “The Robinsons still came down to stay with us. Well, with her. I was in Plymouth by then, doing a Business Studies degree.” That nearly made me laugh, remembering as I did GUP, but laughing was inappropriate. “They were in Falmouth when my mother was dying. She was in the hospital and she died while they were there.