‘Screw your play,’ Oliver called. Then he sank back into his chair and wearily shut his eyes. ‘And everything else.’ His hand groped for the bottle of wine, then he remembered that Tom had taken it. He laughed, scornful. ‘Does he really imagine that there isn’t any more? Be a darling and bring us another bottle from the fridge. The kitchen’s out on the staircase.’

‘No,’ Helen said. ‘But I’ll make us some tea.’

‘I don’t want bloody tea,’ Oliver said, but she brought it anyway. Carefully she set the tray down between them and then knelt beside his chair to pour it.

‘I’m sorry about Pansy,’ she said at last, her head still bent over the teacups.

‘Oh, Pansy doesn’t matter. Not now, anyway.’ He took his cup and wound his fingers around it as though his hands were cold. ‘Pansy’s going is just a symptom.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of the awful, repetitive sameness of everything. I thought, for a little while, that Pansy was going to be something special. But no. She turns out to be just as monotonously rotten as everything else.’

Suddenly, Oliver reached out and tangled his fingers in Helen’s mass of dark hair. He drew her head towards him until it rested against him. Somehow she felt at once how tired he was. His usual restless energy had seeped away, and now he was simply weary. For a moment they sat quietly. Helen felt charged with sympathy for him, and at the same time impotent to dispel the strange blackness that seemed to be gaining the upper hand inside him.

Oliver lifted one of the black curls and watched it wind around his finger. ‘I should have held on to you, Helen Brown, while I had you. You’re calm, and reasonable. You almost had me convinced I could be the same.’

Helen sat motionless, not trusting herself to speak. She was only aware of fear that it would all start up again inside her, that Oliver would come back to tear like a storm through the flat, ordered landscape of her life.

Oliver went on, half to himself. ‘But I wouldn’t have made you happy, you know. What happened was the best thing. I did feel guilty, but I don’t any more.’

Did giving me the money help? Helen wondered. The money that was all gone now, but had kept her family for a few vital weeks. She wanted to talk about it, but Oliver’s train of thought was moving rapidly, half connectedly on.

‘And now it’s too late. I suppose you’re Darcy’s, now.’

‘I’m not anyone’s,’ she protested gently, but Oliver was not to be interrupted.