After a while I unpacked my trunk. Then I looked in the drawer where I had put the stuff out of my suitcases and found the photograph I had of Daniel. It’s quite a big photograph, a portrait his mother had had taken on his sixteenth birthday. I hunted among old Mrs. Fisherton’s framed photographs, found one of anonymous people, two men and two women dressed in the fashion of I don’t know when, maybe the twenties, but in a good silver frame. I took the four unknown people out and put Daniel in. He looked nice, very young and handsome, surrounded by chased and fluted silver. I did something I had never done before and have never done since I left Russia Road, I brought the portrait to my lips and kissed the glass where Daniel’s mouth was. The unshed tears were still there, still behind my eyes, and I wondered when I’d find someone I could tell about my grief.

It was coincidence that when I went out into the area to climb the staircase and pollute the nice fresh air with another cigarette, I saw Silver’s parents packing up their car in preparation for going back to the country. They had been in London for a rare weekend, though I knew nothing about their country place then, or that London weekends were a rarity. Jack Silverman’s legs covered in dense fair hair, almost fur, were the first thing I had noticed about him. Now those legs were covered up in jeans and I’m afraid I thought him too old to wear them. Silver’s mother was in jeans too, the designer kind, I expect, and she had a very smart tweed jacket on as well and an Hermès scarf (I think), the sort that have a pattern of ropes and knots all over them. She was as dark as he was fair and looked Jewish with her handsome aquiline nose and full lips, though he was as much so as she.

He went back into the house and came out again with two more suitcases, which he put into the trunk before closing the lid. It was Beryl who told me they had a country house in Hertfordshire they had bought when his business moved out to St. Albans. Erica Silverman liked being there far more than in Russia Road and they spent as little time in London as possible. As I watched, she got into the passenger seat and he into the driver’s seat and they drove away toward Sutherland Avenue and the Edgware Road.