Oliver seemed to have recovered his own form of equilibrium. He flung himself back into the world in which Helen had first glimpsed him. By day, he rode or went beagling with red-faced, rowdy young men. In the evenings, he dressed up in the frogged velvet uniform of the dining club to which they all belonged and joined them in anachronistic sprees of drink and broken glasses. A succession of pretty girls passed through his rooms. If there was an air of desperation clinging about him, only Darcy and Helen sensed it and they knew that they could do nothing.

Helen’s own sights were fixed on the final Schools in June. Her few hours of free time were spent peacefully with Darcy. Pansy and Stephen were living together, partly in his rooms and partly at Follies, and they seemed to need no other company. Tom was immersed in a workshop production of Ibsen. The darkness of the new play rubbed off on him and the few times Helen saw him she was with Darcy, and Tom seemed preoccupied and coolly unforthcoming. She had a faint sense of missing the closeness that they had shared during the difficult days of As You Like It.

One morning in the last week of the term, Chloe woke up with a queasy start. Everything was as it always was in her room, but a black misery swooped down on her at once. For a second or two she lay tensely, then she swung herself out of bed and half ran down the gallery to the bathroom. Then she hung over the basin and vomited, a thin, sour trickle. Chloe groaned and rested her head against the cool porcelain. It wasn’t over yet. This was the fourth morning and she knew what to expect. After a moment she retched again and then sighed, her hair falling damply around her face. She felt too drained even to jump when someone put a cool hand around her forehead.

‘Poor thing,’ said Pansy. ‘Again?’

Chloe leaned back exhausted.

‘No,’ she said weakly. ‘That’s it, I think.’

‘Go back to bed,’ Pansy ordered. ‘I’ll bring you something.’

Chloe went shivering back to her room. Pansy reappeared with a mug of very weak milkless tea and a thin, dry piece of toast.

‘Thanks,’ Chloe said uncertainly. It was almost the first encounter they had had since the last night of the play.

Chloe sipped the tea and felt warmer at once. The first mouthful of toast was a struggle, but the second tasted wonderful. Chloe found herself smiling at Pansy. The other girl was wearing a knobbly blue dressing gown with a tasselled tie-belt like a schoolboy’s. The cuffs of a homely, striped nightdress protruded from it.

‘D’you really go to bed with Stephen dressed like that?’

The two women stared at each other. Then they dissolved into incredulous laughter.