When it was Easter break I went home and Guy came around to ask me out on the Saturday night. But I was back in London by then. At ten-thirty on Easter Day I was in St. Augustine’s, Kilburn Park, for Sung Eucharist, aware of the cold splash of holy water and the sound of hymns I had never heard before, but almost entirely rapt in contemplation of the size of the place, the narrow aisles, the buttresses, the gallery and its Gothic reredos and the profusion of sculpture in the chancel. This was a rough area of London, or so Beryl said, muggingsland, Heroinville. Her eldest son refused to drive down Kilburn High Road and made a detour along Carlton Vale. Yet in the midst of it, in a green oasis of lawns and tall trees, stood this cruciform church, vast and gracious, its spire visible for miles. That spire was half as high again as a pylon, a tapering needle more than 240 feet tall.

The wisest thing I could have done at this point would have been to go to Max, tell him how much I disliked the psychology and business studies course and ask him how I could change and do architecture instead. I nearly did. I went upstairs one Sunday evening (St. Mary’s, Paddington Green, that morning, the eighteenth-century church restored with compensation for building the Westway, which takes its noisy and brutal route past its windows) and, forgetting my mother’s rules, knocked on one door after another until Selina came.

“Haven’t seen you since forever, darling.”

I had nothing to say to this.

“I suppose you’ve been frantically busy. Like me. We’re shooting the seventh series and you know what that means, a six A.M. start for little me.”

She was alone in the sitting room at the back of the house, a pretty place done in pink and gray with French windows opening onto a balcony. The drawing room was too grand for daily use. I later found out from Beryl that both rooms had been dismal when Max and Selina first met, furnished much like old Mrs. Fisherton’s. Beryl told me that Selina had spent a fortune on doing them up, all the money she got from series one and two of Streetwise. She patted the pink velvet chair next to hers, motioning me to sit down, as if I were a regular visitor. Although they didn’t seem to have had any company that day and it was a Sunday evening, she was dressed in a smart green suit with ruffle-necked blouse pinned with a cameo brooch.

“I was wondering,” I said, having rehearsed this, “if I could have a word with Max.”

Did I mean now? She could hardly have looked more aghast if I had asked to bring fifteen friends around to supper.

“Well, now,” I said, “or soon.”