He might have been talking to one of the anonymous figures who had waited on them at the table. Unseeingly Helen took the tumbler from him. Humiliation welled up inside her. Silently she turned away and groped to a hard leather seat against the wall. At least it was dark beyond the table.

‘Can you keep score?’ someone was asking. She looked up at the complicated mahogany board with its heavy brass sliding markers.

‘No.’

I wish I was at home, she thought helplessly. I can’t ride, or play billiards, or even make the right sort of conversation. It was a mistake to come.

‘I’ll do it.’ Tom stood over her and flicked the markers. His hand touched her shoulder, very gently, before he turned back to the game.

Helen drank some of the brandy. The spirit burned her throat, but it comforted her too and so she drank some more. In front of her, incomprehensible, the game went on.

She concentrated hard on not thinking, or not admitting Oliver to her mind at all. It was as if the central figure had been cut out of a canvas, leaving a background of unimportant detail and a gaping, tattered hole.

She had no idea how much later it was when the game finished and they dispersed.

At last Helen lay in the wide bed in the unfamiliar room. The deep silence was doubly oppressive because Pansy had not come back to her room next door. Helen twisted her head on the pillow, grateful that she had drunk enough of the brandy to blunt her consciousness a little. She shut out the reality of Montcalm, towering and stretching all round her. Instead she imagined herself going home. She made herself walk up the path to the front door, heard the exact sound of her key in the latch. There was the worn strip of rug protecting the hectically patterned carpet. It was three paces to the sitting room door, the high metal handle, then the door opening on to the three-piece suite, the photographs of her brother and herself in matching frames on the upright piano, and the Radio Times beside the china posy in the little china basket on the coffee table. Piece by familiar piece Helen took herself through the little house until at last she fell into an exhausted sleep. The last day of the year was very bright and clear. There had been a hard frost overnight and the park was white rimed under a pale blue sky.