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arrying his post, Marius Potter went up the flight of stairs to Flat 3, constrained to this means of ascending by a fear of lifts. Long ago he had tried to construct a name for this phobia of his, as it might be treskaidecaphobia, a fear of the number thirteen, or ailurophobia, a fear of cats, but the difficulty was that the Greeks had no lifts. He still had quite a good command of classical Greek, so he tried the verb to lift but there was no noun. The same applied to the verb to elevate. In the end he had decided on the verb to rise. Or the noun as in sunrise which seemed to be ‘epidosis’. Epidosephobia was the best he could do but that didn’t really satisfy him. Before he came to Lichfield House he had lived in a block on the eighth floor, so this was a breeze. Generally speaking, Marius was a bit of an anachronism or Luddite. He disliked innovations, though he possessed a fridge and a TV set which was seldom switched on.
    His flat was full of furniture inherited from dead relatives, threadbare armchairs and scuffed tables and curiosities such as stuffed animals and peculiarly shaped china vessels with arms and branches protruding from them reminiscent of hugely magnified photographs of bacteria. There were also a lot of books, new books, hundreds of them, and old books, dusty, all of them non-fiction. One, thick, red with gold lettering on its spine, lay open on an iron table that looked as if it had once belonged in a pub.
    Marius sat down at the pub table and looked at his post. Most of it was junk mail but there was also a letter from his sister Meriel in Aylesbury. Meriel was one of the few people he knew who didn’t reproach him for his lack of a computer and therefore of email. Like him, she disliked modernity but, he had to confess, went one better than he in that she and her husband lived in a dilapidated thatched cottage, heated only by coal fires. Both he and she had a phone, however,and he had a mobile. Perhaps he would phone her and ask for her help in solving a problem.
    â€˜Rose Preston-Jones?’ said Meriel, not sounding at all puzzled. ‘You think you recognise her? Well, of course you do. Don’t you remember when we were all living in that commune in Hackney?’
    â€˜You mean she was there?’
    â€˜Only for a few days. She moved on but she was there.’
    â€˜I don’t remember the name.’
    â€˜We all knew her as Rosie.’
    And then Marius did remember. No wonder he had felt awkward when he thought of asking Rose herself. Now he began to remember and he was back in that commune, that squat really in a Hackney slum, a big old house that he and his sister and a bunch of like-minded hippies had taken over. He was even thinner then than he was now and his hair was longer, bright brown and reaching to the middle of his back. They all dressed in tie-dyed clothes except Rosie who wore cheesecloth. Meriel was right when she said Rosie had only been there for a couple of days before moving on. In fact, it was a day and a night, and that night, without the aid of cannabis or wine, he and Rosie had shared a bed.
    They had all been sitting in a circle, passing round joints, only Rosie wouldn’t. That made him stop and just sit there with his arm around her. She didn’t know where she was supposed to sleep and when he started taking her to Harriet’s room she clung to him and said not to leave her … He remembered what happened as delightful, entirely satisfactory, and he remembered falling asleep and wanting it to go on in the morning and the next day and the next night. But when he woke at some hour he would now find an incredible time to be still in bed, midday probably, she was gone. Not just from his bed but from the house, gone no one knew where. He didn’tattempt to find her. It had just been a one-night stand, nicer and somehow sweeter than most, but never intended to be the start of a permanency.
    And for more than thirty years