This, I felt, was most unfair. Beryl had often told me how willing she was to clean the top flat. It was “the son,” the missing Silver, who wouldn’t let her in. Selina drew me away and introduced me to a woman who said she was “just a housewife,” an actor who’d been a “guest star” on some of the Streetwise episodes, and a woman who designed and made cushions. I didn’t catch their names. These last were more my sort of age, she said, lamenting the nonarrival of “the Silverman boy.” The actor referred to Selina as my aunt and went on doing it after I had corrected him. The cushion designer wanted to know if I had “ambitions to follow in her footsteps.” I said I hadn’t. I was going to be a steeplejack. It was a stupid thing to say, I should have known better, but these people induced a rebelliousness in me and I became reckless.

“Oh, you must be the girl Selina told me about who climbed an electricity pylon with a boy and the boy got killed.”

I was disproportionately upset. Well, perhaps it wasn’t all that disproportionate. I think it was the idle, the thoughtless, way she said it, as if it was something that might happen to anyone, all in the day’s work, just one of those things. That upset me and knowing for sure that Max and Selina talked unfeelingly about me to their friends upset me too. At lunch I was seated not next to Max, which the cushion designer whispered to me would have been “the proper thing” as the party was for me, but between the actor and a man I hadn’t yet spoken to who turned out to be an accountant. Whether he was Max’s accountant or just a friend who happened to belong to that profession, I never discovered. After telling me his name, which I quickly forgot, and what he did, he never spoke to me again. We had ricotta cheese wrapped up in smoked salmon, followed by pasta, a potato dish with salad, and a lemon cheesecake. The actor said that it would be fine if only one or two of one’s friends served a whole lunch or dinner from the Marble Arch Marks & Spencer but the trouble was that everyone did it, so you found yourself eating the same things wherever you went. Then he said, “Oh dear, I keep forgetting she’s your aunt.”

I smiled. I’d managed to secrete one of the smoked salmon and cheese parcels into my pocket, wrapped up in my (paper) napkin. Mabel would enjoy it for supper. The food might be routine for some, but it was a novelty to me after all those tins of things on toast, and I ate greedily. Just as well, for no one addressed another word to me. I didn’t mind that. I listened.