Remembering something, Helen went to her cupboard. At the back, hidden behind boxes and suitcases, there was a little square package. She pulled the wrapping away impatiently and looked down into the brilliance of Tom’s sea picture. The pin that he had hammered for her was still in place. She hung the picture again and stood back to look at it, smelling the flower scent and the tough, challenging draught of sea air.

Stephen waited in his rooms. Pansy was just over an hour late. Hardly at all, by Pansy’s standards. She had stayed with him here only infrequently, but there were signs of her occupation everywhere. There was a paperback novel he had once made a disparaging remark about, which had doubled her enthusiasm for it. There was a bottle of Perrier on his drinks tray because she always asked for it, and through the open door to the bedroom he could see a scarlet sweater tactfully folded and put aside by his scout. In the drawer of his desk, hidden from the inquisitive eyes of students coming for tutorials, there was a photograph of her. She had given it to him in the early, incredible days when she had made him a present of herself. She was wearing her Rosalind-Ganymede costume, breeches and a white laced shirt and a leather jerkin, and she looked vulnerable and mischievous and maddeningly desirable. On the reverse, in her execrable loopy handwriting, she had scrawled ‘To darling Stephen, all my love P.’ Banal, Stephen tried to tell himself. Undereducated, self-centred and spoiled. But for each of those things Pansy was a hundred others too. He ached for her as he had never stopped doing from the moment when she had leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth.

Time after time, in the company of his puzzled children or listening to Beatrice’s tearful voice on the telephone, Stephen wished that he had never seen her. But it was unthinkable that he could do without her now. So he waited on in his rooms, irritable and anxious, and imprisoned as securely as if she had locked him in.

At last, crossing to the window for the fifteenth time, he saw her coming. Short skirt, long tanned legs and hair bleached even blonder by the sun. She was strolling along without a trace of hurry.

Bitch, Stephen thought. Then he saw the heads of the students lounging on the grass turn as she passed, and a hard knot of excitement formed inside him. He moved to arrange himself and his papers at his desk, pretending to be absorbed in his work.

‘Seven o’clock?’ he asked when she came in, smiling at her in spite of his anger.

‘Sorry.’ Pansy was withdrawn, almost sulky. He reached for her at once but she slipped out of his reach and left him feeling lecherous and slimy.

‘Can I have a drink?’

‘Perrier?’