The rooms were filling up rapidly. There were familiar faces from the cast, and backstage at the theatre. There were others that she recognised by sight from grander Oxford circles than those that touched her own – a couple of College masters and their wives, a sprinkling of novelists and poets, and a celebrated painter in the black fedora he always wore. Tom seemed to know and be on terms of easy familiarity with everyone. Helen was impressed, and she felt a little awe creeping into her feelings for him. But even in this sophisticated gathering there was a little stir of people covertly turning to stare as Pansy came in. She was wearing a simple black dress with her hair combed out in a pale halo around her head. Unusually for her she had painted her eyes with extravagant, theatrical rings of blue which made her face look small and fragile, her colouring more delicate. Half a step behind her was Stephen, with the same rapt expression that Helen had seen in the theatre tempered with a kind of defiance.

There was no sign of Beatrice.

Pansy was immediately swallowed up by a hubbub of people. As she accepted the kisses and congratulations, she looked all set for a night of enjoying the limelight. So Helen was the more surprised when she looked up a little later to see Pansy slipping into a seat beside her. Deliberately Pansy set her shoulders against the room and, glancing at Darcy, reassured herself that he was occupied in talking to someone else.

‘Are you avoiding me, Helen?’ she asked directly.

‘Not exactly,’ Helen responded carefully. She wasn’t sure that she even liked Pansy any more, but she shrank from letting her see it. Suddenly she had a sense that Pansy needed friends too. ‘You haven’t been around much,’ she said, truthfully.

‘I’ve been with Stephen.’ Pansy looked down at her thin fingers and restlessly twisted the rings. She was struggling with what she wanted to say. ‘He’s … left Beatrice, you know. Left it all behind. His children, that house and all their lives in it … given it up to camp out in his College rooms, with me.’ She bit her lips and Helen saw her knuckles whitening as she pressed her fists together in her lap. ‘I love him now, Helen, today. Very much. He makes me happier than anyone else has done.’

‘I could see that,’ Helen said quietly.