Pansy was sitting cross-legged in front of the fire with a plate of goulash balanced on her knee. She was waving her fork as she talked, surrounded by a ring of admiring faces. Stephen, on the edge of the group, had recovered his quizzical poise. He beckoned complicitly to Chloe but she shook her head.

‘Even Pansy,’ Oliver said again. Then, abruptly, ‘Where’s Helen? She makes me feel so calm, and then when she’s not around, I forget.’

Chloe shook her head quickly. Oliver was bad news for Helen. And anyway, his job was to keep Pansy occupied. As far away from Stephen as possible.

Upstairs in the room above Pansy’s, Helen pulled her reading lamp down to concentrate the circle of light on the page. She was reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, and the hopeless love of the sonnet sequence saddened and depressed her. From Pansy’s room the noise of talk and laughter grew louder, and then swelled with music and vague thumping. They must be dancing, she thought, and leaned more deliberately over her work. In the past she had sometimes gone with Chloe to Pansy’s impromptu parties, but no longer. It disturbed her to see Oliver. Helen still loved the man she had known, and she missed him almost as much as she had done at the beginning. When she was apart from him, it was easier to live stoically with the loss of him, and the poignant pleasure that her memories of him still brought.

When he was near, in the same room or lounging unthinkingly beside her, it was much harder. He had the same physical effect on her that he always had done. Yet even that she could have dealt with. It was something else that made her uncomfortable. His brilliant, reckless smile was just the same, but Helen thought that the man behind it was changing, and slipping away from them all. He was more capricious, moodier than he had ever been, and the dark moods lasted much longer. His charm was less apparent, and his selfishness more so. Within herself Helen was fiercely loyal to him, but she couldn’t help seeing that he was becoming daily more difficult. She sensed that he was struggling, somewhere that no-one could see or reach, and that he needed help. She loved him, but she knew that he would reject whatever small support she could have offered him. The knowledge was painful so, reluctantly, Helen kept away.

There was another reason, too, why Helen kept away from Pansy’s rooms. The reason was Tom Hart.

The evening at Montcalm had come awkwardly between them. Helen would have given much for it never to have happened. She knew that her reaction had been absurdly violent. He had kissed her, and he had told her a truth about herself. That was all.