‘I won’t try to tell you why,’ Pansy went on. Her crooked smile was painful, hiding something. ‘But I do. Perhaps I’ve only just discovered that older men turn me on. Perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly why, it’s enough that we do love each other like this. But I’m trapped, now. How can I promise him that it’ll still be there tomorrow? And all the other days to justify what he’s given up? I’m scared, you know.’ Pansy looked back over her shoulder at the room full of people. ‘There’s never a simple, finite action, is there? Everything reverberates, messily. Look at us all. Oliver. Beatrice, Stephen, you and me. Chloe.’

Helen looked. Chloe had just come in. She was wearing jaunty, scarlet harem pants and a little sequined top that sparkled when she moved. But her face was tired and drawn. Tom was shepherding her over to a knot of people. He began to make introductions and Helen saw her struggling to smile and listen to the names belonging to the anonymous faces. Then she looked back into Pansy’s blue-painted eyes.

‘Perhaps you’re always presented with too many choices, Pansy,’ she said.

I used to envy you, Helen thought, but I don’t think I do, any more. She wanted to say that even for Pansy, there were choices to be made that wouldn’t hurt anyone, but could think of no way to say it that didn’t sound priggish.

Pansy stood up, as supple as a cat now after Tom’s autocratic rehearsal regime.

‘Oh yes,’ she answered softly. ‘Far, far too many choices. It’s rather limiting, in a way, you know. Not to speak of isolating. But I shouldn’t have asked you to listen about me and Stephen. You wouldn’t have approved, would you?’ Then she added, in quite a different voice, ‘There just isn’t anyone else. But we’re not really made to be friends, you and me. We’re like oil and water. The trouble is, I’m scared that I’m the water. I just evaporate.’ Abruptly, she turned aside. ‘Shit, what does it matter? I’m going to find Stephen.’

Left alone, Helen sat very still for a long moment. She was stuck with a sense of having failed to say or do something important. And now she had lost the chance.

Instinctively she moved closer to Darcy. He was talking calmly to a geologist about the land at Mere. Helen smiled a little. In that moment she realised that Darcy was the most straightforwardly good person she knew. Everything he did, at least, was clear-cut and honest, and as dependable as the rounds of the seasons themselves over the carefully tended acres of Mere. She watched the familiar, undistinguished face and the play of kindliness in it with new affection.