‘Can you fall in love with somewhere so quickly?’ she had asked Tom. ‘And why didn’t you tell me it was so beautiful?’

‘Would you have believed me? And yes, either you love it or you don’t. Thank God you do. Look at you,’ he teased her. ‘More New York than the New Yorkers.’

It was true. She had responded to the raucous vigour of the city with an excitement that was infinitely more alive than the languor that had possessed her in Venice. Yet it had the same effect of arousal. Their hungry exploration of each other was fuelled for her by the sleepless energy around them. She felt more positive and more potent than she had ever done, and she understood the ironic detachment that had set Tom aside as a spectator in Oxford. It was all gone now and he was plunged into work again. She felt that without seeing him here in his native city she could never have understood him, or loved him half as much as she did now.

A month separated them from the evening under the mulberry tree sign when they had made their own kind of peace with Oliver.

Helen’s memory of it was still sharp, but it was overlaid with a patina that spoke of more than a month in time and a distance greater than the width of the Atlantic. A different life. Tom and New York.

Helen shivered a little. She was still unused to the sudden awareness of complete happiness. Anxiously she cocked her head to the silence in the apartment, then heard the splash of the shower. Tom was singing above it.

Helen smiled as she crossed the great white space of the loft and looked south to the peaks of the financial district away down town. If she craned her head downwards, she could see the quiet street outside Tom’s warehouse building. Greene Street, SoHo, New York, she repeated to herself. I’m here. And I can be here, with Tom, for ever.

Over her head in the upper loft space, the little painting of wild flowers against the turquoise sea hung over their bed. It looked as if it had been there always.

Tom came out of the shower in his bathrobe, rubbing at his black hair with a towel until it stood in a rakish crest over his head.

‘Want to go to the Market Diner for breakfast?’

Helen loved the hubbub of Lower West Side diners, and the intricate permutations of breakfast menus.

‘I’ve made coffee. Let’s stay home and have it.’

Tom slung his towel round his neck and reached out for her. ‘Mmm. We could take it back to bed.’

Behind them in the lobby, the letterbox rattled and Helen lifted her head away from his.