With the irony of fate, it had turned out to be Darcy who possessed all the strength. She felt that the tragedy had stripped her of all hers, stripped her of everything except the potential to hurt. And what had it done to Tom? She thought of him, aching with longing, and knew that she couldn’t go to him now. Perhaps he would come back. Perhaps he would give her another chance. And perhaps this wasn’t all that there was left, sitting in silence beside a Darcy she didn’t know, and comparing. The endless, unwanted comparisons ran on inside her head. Even the hand that held hers. Heavy and blunt after Tom’s expressive hands with the quick fingers. Stop it. Oh, stop.

Darcy was watching her with the new decisive expression intensifying behind his eyes.

‘Would you like me to take you out for something to eat?’

‘I don’t think I could eat anything,’ she answered him lifelessly.

With unbearable gentleness he replaced her hand in her lap. ‘I’ll go back to Montcalm, then,’ he said. ‘To be with my mother for a while.’

Helen nodded, and then again to hide the tears that gathered in her eyes. In case Darcy saw them, and stayed. It was much easier to be alone.

Did Tom feel that?

He never came, although she waited for him all through the stifling days before the funeral. The air stagnated in Follies House until she felt that it was almost unfit to breathe. Helen and Chloe saw no-one except Darcy. If Pansy was grieving she did it alone and away from the house, because her room stayed dark and locked. They drew closer together in their isolation, reaching the point of friendship beyond secrets.

‘You don’t want to marry him, do you?’ Chloe asked her in the small hours of one sleepless night. She felt rather than saw the shake of Helen’s head. ‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’

‘Is it so very obvious?’ Helen’s voice was muffled. Her face was buried against her drawn-up knees. ‘Darcy mustn’t know. Must never know.’

‘Oh, Helen. Are you so very certain that he doesn’t know?’

I was certain, Helen thought. Now I don’t think I know anything, any more.

The melancholy sense of things coming to an end possessed them all. Helen began to pack her things. The books went back into the cardboard boxes that Oliver had carried up the stairs for her, and her clothes into the shabby suitcases. The little white room took on its bare, uninhabited look again, but she left Tom’s sea picture in its place over the mantelpiece. She still thought that she could smell the fresh salt air.