Pansy, Pansy. Where was she? What was she doing? Pansy was slipping away from him and he was helpless and enraged. Stephen felt middle-aged, unwholesome, and chafed with the sourness of guilt. The counterpoint to the repetitive theme was Beatrice. Home, children, family. Then Pansy again, the silky feel of her and her small firm breasts and the taunt of sex in her eyes. Stephen hunched against the knife that twisted in him. His eyes travelled in search of distraction along the rows of bent heads. None as bright as Pansy’s. No-one with Pansy’s coltish elegance. He came to Helen, and watched her for a minute. She was writing, not scribbling furiously, but with smooth certainty. He could almost follow the measured length of her sentences. Too bloodlessly correct for his own tastes, Stephen thought, but a clever girl. An odd threesome that, at Follies. Pansy’s friends. Pansy.

It was a long three hours for Stephen.

At last, ‘Will you stop writing now.’

Helen came to the end of her last sentence and sat back. Suddenly her fingers, her arm and her whole body felt like lead. She groped to her feet and, robot-like, took her paper to the box on the invigilator’s desk. Only half recognising him, she saw Stephen watching her. There were creases in his face, and white specks of dandruff on the shoulders of his gown. Awareness began to creep around her again. Real people. Messy real life, she thought.

The surging crowd was carrying her out of the hall, down the corridors into the daylight. It was five o’clock on a late June afternoon. The sun was warm on her head, and everywhere people cheering, stumbling against each other and tipping green and gold champagne bottles to their mouths. Colour flooded back into Helen’s world as if she was living the end of an old, spellbinding black-and-white movie. She began to move, jerkily at first and then running down the steps. She was looking from side to side, knowing that she was searching for one face.

Tom caught her in his arms.

Tom, in jeans and a white shirt, tanned and smiling, waiting for her. She saw the buttons at his collar, the line of his jaw and his hand reaching out to her. He was undoing the black bow of ribbon at her throat, and he took her black academic cap out of her stiff fingers.

‘All over,’ he said gently. ‘Come with me, now.’