Tom’s room was shadowy, and there were thin white curtains lifting in the slow breeze at the windows. He took off her black dress, letting it rustle to a heap at their feet. He unpinned her hair and for a moment he stood with her locked in his arms, watching the black curls uncoiling across the whiteness of her skin. Then deftly he peeled off the last things and she stood in front of him, not proud or diffident, but simply ready to give herself.

Tom took her in his arms and lifted her on to the bed.

Her mouth, her flesh and the inner chasms of herself opened at the insistence of his touch. Tom was a faultless lover that first time. He made her cry out under the gentle brutality of his hands and mouth, and then he bore her away to remote, rocking islands of pleasure that she had never dreamed existed. He was her equal and her opposite half, both knowing and innocent, as gentle as a child and so powerful that even as she cried for him to go on, and on, she was afraid that he would break her in half.

And over himself, his dominance was steely. Only when Helen lay limp in his arms did he release himself, and the cry that he gave was more in pain than pleasure.

When at last he lay still she watched his face and saw it suffused with weariness. Tom had been performing for her, a performance born more out of passion than love.

His dark eyes opened and held hers, and the black lashes were stuck into points with the heat of their bodies. Gently Helen stroked back the damp hair from his forehead. They had taken possession of each other’s bodies, but something still held their hearts apart like a thin, cold sheet of glass. She took his face in her hands and forced him to look at her.

‘What?’ she demanded. Pain came with the weariness into his face, and she felt him shiver.

‘I can’t cry for him.’

Helen circled him with her arms and drew his head down between her breasts. Her hair fell down across his face like a protective curtain.

‘Cry,’ she whispered. ‘My darling, cry now.’

His tears came with long, shuddering sobs that tore at them in the sweet afternoon silence. Helen hunched over him, the meaningless, murmured words of tenderness swallowed between them. She understood his loss, and his grief, and his crying for the imagined, but still shocking moment of negligence that had lost him his friend’s life.