‘We must go,’ Stephen said huskily. Chloe watched them, unspeaking. Some of the old, satisfied glow showed in Pansy’s face. They murmured their goodbyes and went along the echoing gallery. Pansy’s door closed fast behind them.

Chloe’s face set in new, determined lines and she sat down at her desk. Briefly she thought of Pansy, imagining how she would go on through life just as she did now. There would be the steely, unwavering concentration on getting what she wanted, followed by the intense, fruitful period of radiant satisfaction when she had achieved it. Then the focus would shift to something new, whether it was a different lover or a mysterious job. Pansy would be a success, there was no doubt about it, because Pansy always got what she wanted. It was no real concern of hers that she left a trail of wreckage in her bright wake.

The thought floated away from Chloe as she looked down at her work. Pansy and Stephen were forgotten as the waters of concentration closed over her head.

Helen, too, closed herself off in her books. She let herself sink deeper and deeper, living in the worlds created for her by Elizabethan poets or Victorian novelists in preference to her own.

Every morning she woke up to the weight of the same unanswered question, and every day she pushed it aside. After Schools, she repeated to herself. When it’s all over, I’ll confront it then. But not now, not yet. Instead she read more and more avidly, and sat up late under the green-shaded library lamp writing with a compulsion that she had never experienced before. She was working well, better than she could have hoped, and she clung tenaciously to the coolness of academic discipline. Here at least, in this dry world, emotions were at one remove safely between book covers. Helen knew that with every day she allowed to pass, she was making the tangle worse, and part of her detested her own cowardice. Yet she let herself go on hoping that when the right time came she would somehow know what to do, and how to do it without causing pain. The weeks of May and brilliant early June slipped by.

Darcy’s patience both humbled and chafed her. He never complained at the long hours she spent working, and he developed a knack of coming to meet her at the right time, and knowing whether she needed to be left with her own thoughts or to be jollied with cheerful talk. Almost as if she was ill, he coddled her with translucent pink curls of smoked salmon sent by Mrs Maitland, or half-bottles of luscious dessert wine that they drank under the willows beside the river.

Just once, sitting on the shaded white seat where they always picnicked, Darcy turned to her and said, ‘You aren’t very happy, are you?’