Chloe’s head bent and the dark red hair swung across her face like a curtain.

‘Chloe,’ Pansy said urgently, ‘I can’t help it. Any of it. Don’t hate me. Even if you can’t forgive me.’

There was no response. Pansy turned away and brushed past Helen as if she didn’t exist. Then there was a sudden harsh gust of cold air and Pansy vanished into the dark.

When Helen looked again, Chloe was walking away. There was no sound except for the soft padding of her slippers on the bare oak boards.

NINE

Between them, as Tom had predicted, they built up a system for seeing Oliver through the days and nights of the play.

Each night Darcy took him home to Mere. Oliver scoffed at Darcy’s unremarkable car and insisted on driving the black Jaguar recklessly through the country dark. Darcy reported to Helen that once home, they sat up for hours playing game after game of chess. Oliver drank steadily until he had anaesthetised himself enough to fall asleep. Then he would sleep heavily, clinging to oblivion, until late in the morning. Darcy, as always, was up again at first light and made the rounds of his farmwork, half suffocated by yawns. Then Oliver would drive back into Oxford and Helen would try to persuade him to eat something, and then keep him company through the short, sunny afternoons.

Oliver was irritable and resigned by turns, but he had accepted that he had to go on playing Orlando. He was still drinking a good deal but Helen thought that it was a way of keeping himself going. And she guessed that he was taking other things too, when his moods swung from dull apathy to violent impatience with Oxford, As You Like It and Helen herself. Yet Helen found herself growing to like him more, and even to understand him. When they talked and Oliver was not being bitterly flippant, she glimpsed a man who was somehow beleaguered and threatened by all the things that made him enviable to the rest of the world. She remembered how she had seen Oliver’s gilded exterior as protecting an inner, sensitive man, and had fallen in love with that twin image. This new Oliver was closer to the one that she had dreamed up for herself, but he was more complex and infinitely more vulnerable.

Her new feeling for him was nothing to do with the old, hurtful romantic love. But in its way it was just as strong. It was loyal, and protective, and increasingly sharp with anxiety.

There were signs that Oliver felt something different too. Once, when they were sitting in his rooms watching the light outside fade from gold to grey, he looked across at her and said, ‘I suppose we won’t do this any more, when the play’s over? When you’ve delivered me safe and sober to Hart for the last performance?’