A motorboat passed, ploughing a green-white furrow of water that fell away into long ripples licking along the bank.

Helen looked at him, her eyes travelling over his sun-reddened cheek and the square line of his jaw. She could almost hear the seconds ticking past.

Love, fear, and a sudden optimism flared inside her. Maybe it would work.

‘I’m trying to be,’ she said humbly. ‘I’m sorry to make it seem so difficult.’

Darcy’s eyes were still on the river but he took her hand and wound their fingers together. ‘Do you want to change anything?’

The sun warm on her head and shoulders made her uncertainty seem colder and even more threatening.

‘No,’ Helen whispered, hoping.

He turned his head and looked straight into her eyes.

‘Come home to Mere with me for the weekend.’ Prove it, he was saying. Prove us. The shadow was there in his face before she could even reply.

‘Not yet. I can’t yet, Darcy.’

Usually it was Helen who looked at her watch and insisted that she must go back to work. Today Darcy stood up first and began to repack the picnic things. He drove her to the library without speaking and left her with a kiss that barely brushed her cheekbone, yet she felt that it had burned into her skin.

But the next day he was waiting for her again, and the old gentle intimacy between them resumed.

Helen began to number the days left until Schools with painful anticipation. Eleven left, then seven, then only four.

In all this time she saw Tom only once. She had written him a stilted little note to thank him for the sea picture, without mentioning the fair or May Morning. It had gone unacknowledged and she had taken the picture down and hidden it away, rather than let it confront her mutely with his absence, and yet his closeness. Now, in the last week before the deadline of exams that she had set herself, she had been out walking directionlessly through the streets. The close library air had begun to oppress her. Passing the Museum of Modern Art she slipped inside on impulse, thinking that it would help her to empty her mind if she sat in front of a picture. The words inside her head set up reverberations, almost a premonition, but she dismissed them.

Inside the gallery was the confused babble from a private viewing of a new exhibition. Helen began to back away, then a lazy voice behind her said, ‘Going already?’

Tom was instantly so sharply there, so physical and important to her that his nearness shut off the noisy party like a glass wall.

‘I should stay a little. The pictures are worth a look, and the wine’s really quite good.’ He held out a glass to her but she shook her head. She couldn’t trust her fingers to hold it, or her legs not to melt underneath her.