Well then, she would not go. To punish her greed.

She put on the green frock and the glass necklace. She never wore perfume. Her scent... it could only have been the scent of her skin and hair, alien in his tower.

She went when the black clock said four-fifteen, about a quarter past three in the afternoon, as if for an appointment. Which it was.

She used the secretive backstairs door, and found it unlocked.

The coloured window, the fulvous lion and rusty warrior, stabbed through the air of the room, transfiguring it. The ceiling beams were edged in yellow. He stood before the fire, reading from a book, old and mildewed black like the derelicts of Mr Gerard’s shop, As she entered he put the book down, not marking his place.

‘Here you are.’

‘Yes.’

She was shy and awkward at his long hair and his youth. Her dreams had come between their last meeting and this. She wished he had been old like the book, or that she had not agreed to see him.

‘Come to the fire,’ he said, so she advanced.

As she reached him, he moved away.

He’s afraid. He was afraid of her, awkward as she was. Their one area of ground, the music.

‘Will you play Prokofiev?’ she said, grudgingly to assist him.

‘Whatever you like.’

‘You know so many pieces?’

‘Some days, some nights, all I’ve done is play the piano.’

She thought of him in the dark tower, the sea-brushed air furious with notes, harmonies.

The cat was absent. She had come to associate the cat with him.

She sat in the chair she had taken on the last occasion. Did the lines of his body relax a little? He went to the piano and the music began at once.

It was as if he spoke to her. Soft cadences, a stormy undertow, a resolution in swift chords. The development wandering across the black and white plain.

She turned in the chair to watch him.

His hands moved in possession, quicker and slower. The muscles fanned across his back beneath the dark shirt, and the long jet of hair shifted and spread.

She seemed to see his aura. It was cold and pale as steel, the essence of his darkness.

What would it be like to stand behind him, to touch his shoulders lightly, and the back of his neck, beneath the tempest of hair? To feel that power of the hands and the body vibrating through his skin to hers?

‘Adamus,’ she said under her breath.

The piece concluded or became another. The harmonies were acidulous, the tempo raged. Her heart beat so quickly it seemed to hurt her.

Who was he?