‘Come back,’ she begged him in a high, thin voice. ‘Oh please, come back. I will look after you. You know I will.’ The scream came now, and one of the ambulance men helped her away.

‘Will somebody take her back indoors?’ he asked.

Helen put her arms around the cushiony shoulders and led her away. As she went she saw that Gerry was standing stiffly over Oliver, looking down into his face as if he wanted to apologise for something. At last Tom seemed to notice him.

‘You can only just swim yourself, can’t you?’ Gerry nodded numbly. ‘You’re a very brave man,’ Tom said. His voice was breaking and he turned sharply away. He walked like an old man down to the tip of the island and stood staring away into the horrible water. Helen went on up the path with Rose. Fear began to well up through the immediate shock and grief. Tom would take the responsibility for tonight upon himself, and he would take it hard.

Helen forced her own feelings out of her head and set about tending to Rose. The fat woman was utterly distraught. She was babbling through the tears that pulsed out of her screwed-up eyes. ‘I loved him. I let him have anything, oh, everything that he wanted just to keep him coming here once in a while. You think that’s impossible, an old woman like me, loving a boy like that? But I did. I loved him like a lover. My lovely Oliver.’

Helen couldn’t bear to listen. ‘We all loved him,’ she said gently. It’s true, she thought. For his reckless, doomed charm, we all loved him in our different ways.

Mechanically she groped about in Rose’s witches’ kitchen, making sweet tea and searching for something that would act as a sedative. At last, leaving Rose whimpering in her rocking chair, she went back into the hall.

They had brought Oliver in on a stretcher. The police were there now, burly men flashing silver buttons and chains and talking about statements. Tom was waiting tensely with Gerry beside him. Helen bled for the pain in his dark eyes. A young doctor, his face bleared with sleep, was folding a blanket back over what was no longer Oliver, but simply a cold, sad body. Helen saw how still it lay under the bright scarlet blanket. She looked away, up past the exquisite Jacobean panelling and the fat carved balusters of the gallery to the dim heights above them.

It was just here, she remembered, that she had first spoken to him. So long ago, now.