So Peter took the photograph and said he’d send Stephen and Zoe a copy when the film was developed. She gave him the address of the flat she and Stephen shared and he noted it was in the next street but one to his. They might have walked there together, which was what Stephen, remarking on this second coincidence, seemed to want. But seeing the tense, strained look in Lisa’s eyes, Peter refused, and they separated in Holland Park Avenue.

‘You didn’t mind about not going with them, did you?’ said Lisa.

‘Of course not. I’d rather be alone with you.’

‘I’m glad,’ she said, and then, ‘I did it for you.’

He understood. She had done it for him, to prove to him she could conquer those superstitious terrors. For his sake, because he wanted it, she would try. He took her in his arms and kissed her.

She leant against him. He could feel her heart beating. ‘I shan’t tell anyone else about it,’ she said, and he knew she meant her mother and the witch women.

When the film was developed he didn’t show it to her. Zoe and Stephen should have their copy and that would be an end of the whole incident. But when he was putting it into an envelope, he realized he would have to write a covering note, which was a bore as he didn’t like writing letters. Besides, if he was going to take it to the post, he might as well take it to their home. This, one evening, he did.

He had no intention of going in. But as he was slipping the envelope into the letter box, Zoe appeared behind him on the steps.

‘Come in and have a drink.’

He couldn’t think of an excuse, so he accepted. She led him up two flights of stairs, looking at the photograph as she went.

‘So much for this fantastic likeness,’ she said. ‘Could you ever see it?’

Peter said he couldn’t, wondering how Lisa could have been so silly as to fancy she had seen her double in this woman of thirty, who tonight had a drawn and haggard look. ‘It was mostly in your friend’s imagination,’ he said as they entered the flat. ‘We’ll see what he says about it now.’

For a moment she didn’t answer. When her reply came it was brusque. ‘He’s left me.’

Peter was embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked into her face, at the eyes whose dark sockets were like bruises. ‘Are you very unhappy?’

‘I shan’t take an overdose, if that’s what you mean. We’d been together for four years. It’s hard to take. But I won’t bore you with it. Let’s talk about something else.’

Peter had only meant to stay half an hour, but the half-hour grew into an hour, and when Zoe said she was going to cook her dinner and would he stay and have it with her, he agreed. She was interesting to talk to. She was a music therapist, and she talked about her work and played records. When they had finished their meal, a simple but excellent one, she reverted to her own private life and told him something of her long and fraught relationship with Stephen. But she spoke without self-pity. And she could listen as well as talk. It meant something tc him to be able to confide in a mature well-balanced woman who heard him out without interruption while he spoke of himself and Lisa, how they were going to be married when she was eighteen and when she would inherit half her dead father’s fortune. Not, he said, that the money had anything to do with it. He’d have preferred her to be penniless. All he wanted was to get her away from that unhealthy atmosphere of dabbling with the occult, from that cloistral home where she was sheltered yet corrupted.