On the last evening, Tom made a slow detour through the narrow streets towards Christ Church. It was Midsummer’s Eve, and the thick stone walls seemed saturated with light and warmth. He circled through New College, walking even more slowly where clouds of scent drifted from the great herbaceous borders. On the still air the chock of a croquet mallet and ball followed by a burst of cheering carried across open lawns. Snatches of music from open windows were amplified and then swallowed up by the dense green of top-heavy trees. Tom stopped in the twilit silence of the cloister, his white shirt spectral in the dimness. He leaned against one of the low, ancient arches to watch the shadows deepen on the square of turf within, but his inner eye saw nothing. His mind was elsewhere; working, wondering. At length he jerked away from the pitted warmth of the stone and began to walk with new determination. The light in the curve of the High was too bright and dusty, and the traffic too insistent. He ducked quickly across it and the urban noise was swallowed at once by the little cobbled alleyways beyond. He looked up once at the slit of blue sky overhead and smiled briefly. It brought back a sudden memory of New York. Mid-town Manhattan in the summer heat, he thought, couldn’t be farther from the cluster of Oxford around its jewelled lawns and the ring of cool, lush water meadows that shielded it.

But the year in Oxford was ending, and he was ready to go home. He had done everything that he had come to do, but now there was one more thing that had begun to matter more than anything else. One more thing, and without it it wouldn’t matter where he was or what he was doing.

Helen.

Fragile, tough-minded, cool and passionate. Helen. He wanted her more than anything else. More than all Greg Hart’s theatres, more than successes and acclaim and the artistic power that had always seemed so seductive. Without Helen he didn’t want any of it, and Tom’s strength had always been in knowing exactly what he wanted.

The certainty had been growing in him since New Year’s Eve. It was then that he had first seen, behind the smouldering anger in Helen’s eyes, a strength that fascinated him far more than Pansy’s practised appeal. Slowly his interest in Pansy had slipped away as he watched Helen. His friendship and concern for her had deepened into something far more important as the weeks passed. At first he had waited, biding his time coolly until Oliver’s potent spell was exorcised and New Year’s Eve was forgotten, but almost at once it had seemed to be too late.

Darcy had intervened.