The people at 17 and 13 were less interesting, an elderly doctor and his wife next door to us while 13 was divided into two flats whose occupants Beryl hardly ever saw, they were out all day and she had keys. One couple she called, with a fine disregard for political correctness, “Indians and very dark.” The others had virtually no furniture but mattresses on the floor and steel chairs. It may have been minimalist (not Beryl’s word) or perhaps they could afford nothing better.

The next time I went out, which was probably that afternoon, I stood on the other side of the road and looked up beyond the floral moldings and the turbanned man to the top floor of 15. Three casement windows in hoodlike dormers were tucked in the mansard just as they were in all the other houses in the terrace. It was November and all the windows were shut but the middle one had been closed carelessly, catching up a corner of a net curtain between casement and window frame. It flapped in the breeze, a thin grayish rag. This was the window that had caught the light from the setting sun that evening I had watched Jack and Erica Silverman leave in their car. I wondered what Beryl had meant by saying “half a dozen” people lived up in that top flat, but when I asked her she said, as she often did in answer to my questions, “I don’t know, love. I’ve told you everything I know and now you know as much as I do.”

Some days, instead of going to GUP, I went for long walks. I specially did this when even the new lighting seemed unable to dispel that oppressive ceiling-coming-down-on-my-head feeling and I had to get out for a while. I walked Maida Vale up to Kilburn and stared in wonder at St. Augustine’s Church, big as a cathedral, its tall spire visible for miles. How I would have liked to climb that spire! I walked St. John’s Wood and Primrose Hill and Camden Town, always lifting up my eyes to the rooftops, and I walked the canal, from Camden Lock to the Portobello Road, being obliged, of course, and not at all unwillingly, to come up briefly onto the street at the Maida Hill tunnel. I admired the tall Gothic church of the Holy Catholic Apostolics in Maida Avenue and St. Mary Magdalene in Woodchester Square with another high climbable spire and soaring tower blocks all around it. Eventually, I suppose, I’d have climbed one of those spires if I hadn’t met Silver.

I walked in daylight but as winter came on and evening started earlier and earlier, I was often out after dark. Lighted streets and glowing lamps in warm depths behind windows make one long for companionship, for someone to sit with in those rooms, those restaurants and pubs and cafés. Clubbing as a way of life for the young was only just coming in then, but there are always places where teenagers and people in their twenties congregate.