“Come back all I said. Isn’t that a funny expression? My grandmother, the one that left me the money, she used to say it. Only you can’t call back what you’ve said.”

“You can,” I said. “I’ll let you.”

So you can see that we were nearly restored to our former happiness. Set to be together forever and ever. As far as “forever and ever” means anything when you’re twenty. Apart from the faint anxiety of a great sympathy with Silver and an understanding of his disturbed feelings, I felt happy. I saw our future plain and clear. It never once occurred to me—why would it?—that I had once seen my own just as brightly, Daniel and Oxford and science in academia, before the pylon.

Wim was sitting up in a chair, though the drip was still there and the pulleys and weights on his leg. He looked very uncomfortable. Silver told him that as soon as he came out of there he was to return to the flat. It would be his home as long as he wanted. Poor Silver hadn’t seen, though he soon did, that Russia Road would be the last place on earth Wim would want to be in. I won’t say “set foot in,” for anything of that nature seemed a long way off. Looking back, reading the diary, I can see that Silver and I never really understood Wim’s feelings, we never gauged the full dreadfulness of what had been done to him. We knew and discussed the magnitude of Jonny’s intent, but Wim as a suffering being, a strong carefree man disabled and broken, that never really came home to us. Silver once said he was like Samson, blinded, put to the mill with slaves, but I see now that this was just a metaphor, all right to give you an idea, not much when it comes to real agony, real loss of all that makes life worth living.

We meant well. I can see now that meaning well, which is supposed to pave hell, ruled us. It paved our lives, covering shifting sands.

I sometimes saw policemen walking in pairs along the streets of Maida Vale but I had seldom seen a police car parked with a driver at the wheel and another man sitting beside him. In this case it was a woman officer at the wheel and a man next to her. The car was parked a little way down Torrington Gardens, on the same side as the burned houses. We passed it, coming back from the hospital. It was quite unimportant, nothing to get alarmed about. Beryl had told me a few days earlier that there had been looting in those houses and had given a graphic description of some of the horrors vandals had left behind. That would account for the presence of the police car.