She shivered, and her fingers twisted in the sappy stalks of grass. Silence seemed to spread outwards from their grassy hollow until the world hung poised in the buttery sunshine. When at last her eyes were drawn to him, Helen saw past the self-sure, handsome mould of his face, past the ironic detachment that he used as a cloak, to a real question. Plain hope quenched the mocking lift of his smile. His eyes were not just dark but velvety brown, faintly flecked with hazel, and his mouth was stained like hers with the abundant sweet red juice.

Helen knew that she had all the time in the world. Slowly, without taking his eyes from Tom’s, she lifted her glass to him and filled her mouth with the last of the prickling bubbles. She wanted to laugh, rejoicing, but she wanted something else first. She let her glass go and it rolled away among the buttercups. Then she reached out and touched the taut skin over his cheekbones, and moved to lock her hands behind his dark head. She lifted herself off the grass to reach up to him.

When their mouths met, they were very gentle. It was the sealing of a pact between them, and Helen felt again the sweetness of her Italian dream. But now when she opened her eyes, he was still there. He was very close, familiar to her but suddenly intensely exotic. She wanted to explore him, setting sail on an inner voyage from which she knew there would be no turning back. As they lay watching each other, Helen began to hear again, the hum of bees over the clumps of meadowsweet and the drone of a light aircraft invisible in the blue above. Around her head the grass was alive with minute rustlings of insects. The world seemed ordered, a rational progression of things large to small, and unbelievably beautiful.

Here and now, Helen thought. This is where I want to be.

But Tom moved back a little and she frowned to focus on his face again. He reached for it, caught her hand in his, and she felt the heavy stone on her finger digging into her flesh.

‘So you won’t do it?’

For a shaming moment Helen had to search her mind, and then remembered Darcy. They had planned that he would meet her from the last exam. He would have been there in the crowd at the foot of the steps too, craning to see her. But the face that she had lit on had been Tom’s, and she had gone with him without thinking.

Worse – she had gone eagerly. She had a sudden picture of Darcy waiting, seeing the last stragglers empty out of the halls and the tide of celebration ebbing away up the High to leave him stranded.

‘Do what?’ she echoed Tom’s question stupidly.

‘Helen,’ Tom said quietly. ‘You aren’t a fool.’