Chloe and Helen had left Follies together in the chilly, early summer dawn. It was Chloe’s first May morning, and Helen’s last. Pansy had declined to come, saying that even the best party in the world wouldn’t tempt her out at five a.m. In the subdued atmosphere that reigned in the house, no-one had felt like staying up all night.

So Helen and Chloe walked through Christ Church Meadows together, and joined the rowdy throng under the tower. It was a colourful gathering in the pale light. Bunches of bright balloons bobbed from the lamp-posts, and gaudily dressed morris men with garters of jingling bells jigged to insistent fiddle music. From the river came screams and rising plumes of water as people pushed each other in. With the shouting and singing and competing bands, the noise was deafening. Helen and Chloe were swept backwards and forwards by the jostling mass.

But at six o’clock the first bell tolled, and was taken up by chime after chime across the city. Silence fell, and the crowd waited.

Helen craned her neck to look upwards and glimpsed a flag of white sleeve. Then she heard the first notes rising, pure and clear, as the tolling bells died away.

The Chapel choir had filed out on to the leads, their surplices fluttering. As they did every year, they sang a spring anthem into the windy space over the tower. Beneath them hundreds of faces turned up to hear the high, thin singing as it was snatched away from them into the grey-white sky.

It was over almost as soon as it had begun. Magdalen bells rang out again, almost drowned by the storm of cheering and singing, whistles and handclapping.

Another summer had been welcomed.

Suddenly Helen was blinking back tears. It was almost all over. It was a bare month until Schools, and then Oxford would erupt in the brief, hectic glitter of Commem week. After that it would be finished. And she herself would be Darcy’s wife.

It was in that moment, fighting against the stinging tears, that she saw Tom watching her. He was quite close, sitting on the parapet of the bridge with his back against the latticed pillar that carried one of the white-globed lights. His bright, flippant clothes made him part of the crowd, but he was separate too. Helen thought she saw the detached amusement in his face at the eccentric Englishness of it all. But when his eyes met hers there was no mockery in them. There was simply a question, wordless but no less clear to both of them. His dark eyes held hers insistently, demanding a response.

They hadn’t seen each other since their evening at the fair.