She confided in him one evening when she was drunk. It had been somebody’s birthday and there had been a special meal. They had broken into the homemade wine, though Alex said it wasn’t really ready. They were in the living room, a strange place still mostly full of Alex’s aunt’s furniture, but with cushions added on the floor. Alex’s latest boyfriend was playing the guitar. Most of them were smoking dope but Joanna refused it, and then she started talking to Simon.

‘I never smoke,’ she said. ‘I was really heavily into heroin before I came here. It really cracked me up. That’s why I had to drop out of college. My bloody family locked me up in a nursing home to sort me out.’

He was not sure what to say. She was sitting on the floor beside him.

‘But it worked,’ he said. ‘ It did sort you out?’

‘Do you think so?’ she said. She seemed pleased. ‘Perhaps it did.’ But she still seemed unhappy and lonely, and he put his arm around her to comfort her and she nestled up to him like a child needing reassurance.

‘What will you do now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Go back to college, I suppose, if they’ll have me.’

That night he thought she might go to bed with him. He walked with her up the stairs, still with his arm around her, and at the door of her room he kissed her. But she pulled away, tense and frightened, and he realised it would not be that easy. She became a challenge, and as the summer went on he grew obsessed with her.

At the end of August, just as he was preparing to return to the university, he asked her to marry him. He had decided that that was the only way to deal with the situation. He would never get her unless she felt secure. He had even discussed it with Alex, who had replied cautiously that the plan might work but that Jo had more problems than he realised and he might be taking on more than he’d bargained for.

‘I love you,’ he said to Joanna, ‘and I want to marry you.’ It was early one sunny morning and they were walking along the lane from the house. He had meant to tell her when they were up on the hill with the view of the lake in the distance, but he could not wait.

She turned to him. ‘Are you sure?’ she said.

‘Of course.’

She seemed to be turning the matter over in her mind as if it were a business proposition.