I used to believe that whereas men only go about with women they want to go about with, that they can choose, women often take up with men they don’t even like much, just for the sake of having someone and being seen with someone. Since then I’ve revised this opinion and now I doubt if even the first part is true. People take what they can get, not what they want, and often not much choosing comes into it. Liv didn’t much like Jonny or fancy him but still she let him make love to her (if you don’t mind I will omit the cruder version) in a dark passage off Shirland Road that smelled of cats and tandoori takeaway. Up against the wall it was, what Silver called a “kneetrembler.” She neither liked nor desired Jonny but she needed him. He was someone to talk to, someone outside the James-Claudia-children ménage. She saw him too as her means of getting away, without knowing what kind of escape she meant.

Instead of reading the magazines, I thought about her, what she’d told me and what Silver had, the things she’d told me about Jonny and what at last made her ask him for asylum. Jonny lived at Silver’s from time to time. They had met on a roof. Silver had been on the roof and Jonny emerging onto a balcony from a fourth-floor window with a backpack full of someone’s jewelry. When he knew Silver wasn’t going to shop him, he went back to 15 Russia Road with him and in through the window I had seen Wim enter by that first time I was there. Silver said afterward that if the jewelry Jonny had taken had been a lifetime’s accumulation of treasured pieces, a wedding and engagement ring, for instance, a cameo handed down from a grandmother— he claimed he would have been able to tell—it would not have been in his power to make Jonny put them back, but nor would he have made Jonny welcome and offered him sanctuary and a bed for the night. The house Jonny had raided was well known to Silver, as were a lot of houses in Maida Vale. He was quite aware that it wasn’t divided into flats, that one wealthy couple lived in the whole of it. He examined Jonny’s haul carefully, said it would certainly be insured, and Jonny was to give “a tithe” to the poor, by which presumably he meant underpass dossers. (Well, no, I’ve never seen them but I know they’re there.)

I don’t know whether Jonny ever did so. Probably not. But he must have made a promise because he soon became a permanent if irregular resident of Silver’s place. And it was there that he took Liv when she escaped and needed sanctuary.