I missed the first session. It was on one of the days that I simply failed to go. There were a lot of those days by the time my twentieth birthday came in February. I didn’t plan them, I’d simply wake up in the morning, look at the clock, and decide I wasn’t going in. I’d get up late and, instead of hanging about indoors battling against claustrophobia, wander around Maida Vale and Paddington, looking at buildings, especially the tops of buildings, following the course of the canal and dropping into cafés for a coffee or a milkshake and a sandwich. Once I ventured all alone into a pub and asked for a glass of white wine. No one stared, no one thought it odd, and after that I’d often have a drink in a pub with a roll or a hot pie for my lunch.

We sometimes have a sunny week in February. We did that year, it was warm and bright for five days. GUP didn’t see me on any of them. I treated myself to a half-term holiday. I opened old Mrs. Fisherton’s bedroom window as wide as the sash would go and the bright fresh air rushed in. Another welcome visitor who rushed in was the tortoiseshell cat. I don’t know if she belonged to someone or if her owner had moved and she had come back to her old home as cats do or if she was just a stray. But she seemed well fed and when I found her curled up on my bed and stroked her she felt sleek and plump. By that time I had taken great strides in household management and was able to cook myself elaborate dishes like beans on toast and boiled eggs and pasta out of a packet. That evening I was going to have sardines but I gave them to the cat and had tinned spaghetti myself. Those sardines did the trick and she was mine. She went out every day and sometimes stayed out a long while but I left the window open for her, even when it got bitterly cold again, and she always came back. I called her Mabel after my ghostly hostess.

By then I had broken two rules of living at old Mrs. Fisherton’s, the no-smoking rule and the no-pets one. Nobody had told me pets weren’t allowed. It was something you took for granted with Max and Selina, just as you assumed there’d be a no-leaving-windows-open rule, no subletting, no lovers, and no one visiting after ten P.M. On my birthday Selina invited me to lunch. Or, rather, she invited me for a birthday lunch two days later, on the Saturday. She and Max naturally believed I had my nose to the grindstone at GUP on weekdays.