I still remember in fine detail that day and the one that followed it, just as I remember pylon day and a certain day walking by the canal in August. Whether other people’s memories work like that I don’t know, but I have always been able to recall all the circumstances and conversations and the feelings I had on momentous or terrible days, as if these things were written on tablets of stone for me to reread at will or in spite of myself. I don’t always need my diaries. So it was on that August day and that Thursday. Thursday was when I met Silver.

Beryl came in in the morning. Her knowledge of honorary degrees was as sketchy as mine but she merited a first-class degree herself in listening at doors and overhearing private conversations. “The Professor,” she said, had written to a newspaper. The Times, she thought it was, one of those big papers, anyway, not the kind “normal people” read, and told them this place had offered him whatever it was and he had turned it down. He was furious because they had neither printed his letter nor written anything about it in their pages. And she, Mrs. that is, had said maybe they’d only write about it if it was Oxford or Cambridge and the Professor said not to be more stupid than she could help, if it had been Oxford or Cambridge he’d have accepted it. That was my first intimation that for Max and Selina, marriage might not be all sweetness and light.

Beryl was wearing black leggings again, loose on her sticklike legs, and a bright lime-green jumper. She’d covered her hair with a turban, which made her look like a 1940s factory worker I had seen pictured in one of my London books. She told me I wasn’t to worry about Mabel. She knew for a fact her owners had lived in Sutherland Avenue, moved out, and left her with their old neighbors, who had never really wanted her. I’d be doing everyone a kindness if I kept her. As to the Professor and Mrs., they were going to have their dining room done up, turquoise and black and white, very nice if you fancied cans of baked beans. The decorators would be in and out for months, leaving dirty footmarks. Beryl sniffed the air appreciatively. I had been smoking like a chimney, she could tell, ruining my young lungs, but it made a lovely perfume.