There was a strip of shade beneath the wall separating Audrey’s rubbish-tip garden from the next-door rectangle belonging to the two young men. We sat in the folding chairs that I had hauled out of my cellar. Paul read the Observer with close concentration while I flicked through the supplements. I knew we were attracting attention, from inside and outside the house. As they parked their cars or walked past with shopping bags, neighbours glanced across and then looked more closely. If I happened to catch anyone’s eye, I nodded and smiled. Nothing moved behind Audrey’s shrouded windows, but I knew she and Jack were watching.

When lunchtime came Paul strolled round the corner to a bakery and coffee shop, and came back with a brown bag. We were eating our picnic when the people from the other side emerged from their house. They stood and looked at us.

‘Hello?’ the woman said pointedly. She was wearing pearl stud earrings and a blue sundress, and her husband was in salmon-pink Lacoste.

Paul and I introduced ourselves and I explained about Jack and Audrey, as lightly as I could.

‘We heard that the police were here,’ the woman said. I wondered if she was the one who had called them.

‘Yes. No need for that, of course. Jack’s just going through one of those adolescent phases. Audrey’s a sort of family friend.’

‘Is she?’ The man looked at us and then into the garden, as if to say that I must be a fine friend.

The woman clearly felt this was too confrontational. She said quickly, ‘Anyway, we know all about adolescent phases. I’m Gilly, by the way, and this is Andrew.’

I told them our names and Paul added pleasantly that he was one of Jack’s teachers, so they wouldn’t assume he was his father. Gilly asked which school and when he told her she said oh yes, she’d heard it was very good. ‘We’re fee payers, for our sins,’ she added.

It was rather like being at a dinner party. I was thinking that just because we ate tomato and mozzarella sandwiches from the posh deli and talked about schools, Gilly and Andrew automatically assumed we were on the same side, whereas Audrey with her fierce solitude and her cats and garden full of rotting cardboard never would be. My sympathy was with her.

‘Well,’ Gilly concluded, ‘we’d better get a move on, we’re going out to lunch. Let us know if we can do anything to help, won’t you?’

As they were getting into their car they stopped to talk briefly to a man who was trimming his hedge and I saw Andrew nodding in our direction. The news of our sit-in would travel fast around Turnmill Street.

The afternoon trickled by in a daze of heat.