True to his promise, Darcy came again. He came so often that their outings together started to fall into a pattern. Usually they would walk somewhere, quite often in the quiet corners of the town itself. Darcy had not been at Oxford. ‘Agricultural College. Much more my line’ he had told her, but he displayed a surprising knowledge of odd, out-of-the-way treasures of the city. Together they visited the mournfully erotic statue of the drowned Shelley hidden in a corner of his one-time college, and the Epstein Lazarus at New College. Once Darcy took her hand as they stared up at the Burne-Jones stained glass in Christ Church Cathedral. When they turned away again, he gently released it.

On other days he drove them out into the country and they walked quiet lanes and footpaths almost obliterated by brambles. Afterwards Darcy took her to unfrequented pubs and bought her halves of malty, hoppy real ale with such enthusiasm that she began almost to enjoy them. When they ate together, it was ploughman’s lunches, or curries in odd little restaurants on the city’s outskirts.

Wherever they went, no-one seemed to know Darcy. Once or twice a barman nodded at him, or an old man in wellingtons sitting in a corner beside the dartboard might murmur, ‘Evening to you.’ But that was all. It couldn’t have been more different from going to places with Oliver. Everywhere Oliver went, heads turned after him, and nudges and whispers made ripples in his wake.

Oliver would never have bothered with the quiet pleasures which Darcy enjoyed. Helen tried and failed, amused, to imagine him in a public bar somewhere, watching a darts match with a pint mug of beer in his hand. No. Oliver belonged in his Jaguar, driving too fast to a chic restaurant where the waiters leapt to attend to him and where the other diners tried discreetly not to stare.

Helen remembered her own brief times in the Jaguar beside him, or in the casually expensive disarray of his rooms, as if from another life. She hoarded the memories, but the knowledge that it was over came more easily.

And unlike Oliver, Darcy was the most easy-going companion she had ever had. He liked to hear Helen talk, and she told him happily about her work, her family, the small events of every day. All the things that she had thought too dull or too humble for Oliver. Darcy would listen and nod, walking alongside her with his hands in the pockets of his corduroys. When he put forward his own opinions, he did it mildly, almost with an air of surprise that he should find himself expressing an opinion at all.