If I had done what I was supposed to be doing and concentrated on my studies and my course, made friends among my fellow students, I might have seen 19 Russia Road for what it was, a lodging, and Max and Selina my landlords. So it was all my own fault, but knowing that did nothing to help the loneliness. There was one person and only one who made contact with me and whom I sometimes saw. His name was Guy Wharton, he was a neighbor of ours in Suffolk. At any rate, he lived in a house just across the river from us, or his parents did, and when he wasn’t there he was in London in a flat he had in South Kensington. I had been at old Mrs. Fisherton’s for about two months when he wrote to me. Anyone who wanted to get in touch with me had to write since phoning was impossible.

It wasn’t the first letter I had ever had from him. He wrote to me when I was in hospital after the pylon and again when I was back home and going through that long miserable depression. And of course he came to see me. Guy was the only person who didn’t blame me for what happened or lecture me about it or ask why, why, why? He never talked about it at all unless I raised the subject. When I did, he managed to suggest that this adventure that went so disastrously wrong was just an unfortunate episode in my life I was lucky enough to have come out of physically unhurt, and that Daniel’s death was nothing to do with me but his own fault.

Somehow I never dared agree with that. If I didn’t take responsibility for it, I had a strange superstitious feeling that he’d die all over again, and die reproaching me. But it was a comfort to hear Guy say it, the only one who did. And it was good too to have one friend who treated me as a normal ordinary human being and not a monster.

The letter I got in November was asking me questions like, was I settling in, getting on all right, enjoying the course? Guy was older than me, about the age I am now, and he had got beyond that time of life when people don’t ask others how they are or tell them they’re looking well or, come to that, ask them if they’re settling in. He was grown up. The letter didn’t ask me out anywhere, I had never been out with him, but it said I knew where he was if I wanted him and please to give him a ring sometime. Could he have my phone number? It would be nice to meet before Christmas.