The exhilarating sense of freedom returned to her, doubly sweet because it was shared and untinged with loneliness. We can go anywhere, she thought. Do anything. And then, Montcalm would have crushed me with its very weight.

Tom felt her eyes on him and looked up, his dark face suddenly serious.

‘No regrets?’

‘Not one.’

‘You don’t feel that you are leaving too much behind? Do you remember the day we met in Addison’s Walk? You told me that you were saying goodbye to Oxford, and you looked so sad, and so brave, that I wished there was anything in the world that I could have done to change it for you. Perhaps without knowing it that was when I fell in love with you.’

‘You were thinking about Pansy,’ Helen reminded him cheerfully. ‘And no, I don’t care about anything except being with you. I’ve done everything I want to do here. There are all kinds of things and places I want to do and see, but I couldn’t begin without you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘We’ll do them all, I promise, together.’ He came to her and rested his cheek against her hair. ‘I’m glad you’re not at Follies any more,’ he murmured. ‘While you were there I was still afraid that I might lose you. Not like Oliver, and not quite to Rose’s malign influence, but something like that.’

‘To Rose?’ Helen started back.

‘You didn’t know?’ Tom asked her gently. ‘That it was Rose who supplied him with the pills, and the coke, and the rest of her stock-in-trade? That was her particular hold over him. And over your unhappy friend Frances Page, who was more loyal to the old witch than she ever deserved.’

Helen leaned her head against the solidity of his shoulder again. She saw the unwholesome tangle of Rose’s kitchen web, and the whole little history with shadowless clarity.

‘No,’ she said humbly. ‘I didn’t know that. I just felt sorry for her.’

Tom’s arms tightened around her.

‘Don’t change,’ he said with sudden fierceness. ‘Not ever.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she answered, half to herself. If we can stay just like we are now. If we can only be so lucky. ‘Tom? Let’s go to bed. Now. I need you very much.’

Almost roughly, he lifted her and carried her away.

Helen stood at the high window and looked out, still not quite believing it or herself. The New York skyline was just as she had seen it in a thousand corny pictures, but not one of them had prepared her for the exuberance of the real thing. The flash and glitter of sun on glass and the minutely shaded perspectives of block laid against block receded up town ahead of her, beckoning seductively.