He let go of her wrist and leaned away from her to fumble in one of his pockets. When he settled himself, Helen saw that he was holding a key ring, with a small, silver propelling pencil dangling among the keys. Quickly, Oliver unscrewed it and Helen saw that it was not a pencil at all, but a hollow tube. Oliver patted his pockets again and then produced a tiny silver-backed mirror. Finally from his wallet he extracted a single, crisp pound-note.

‘I can’t stand the ostentation of people who use fifties,’ he told her. Helen watched, bewildered.

Frowning with concentration now, Oliver shook a tiny drift of white powder from the tube on to the mirror. Then he held it out to her.

‘Snort?’ he asked, casually.

‘What is it?’

‘Cocaine,’ he answered, enunciating the word very carefully. ‘What did you think?’

‘No,’ Helen cried out before she could bite back the word behind her teeth. Suddenly, and with startling vividness, she remembered Frances Page being driven away in an unmarked car by a young and pretty policewoman and a creased middle-aged man who bore no resemblance to the drug-squad officers of television serials.

Oliver shook his head. ‘It’s harmless, you know, unless you’re very stupid. And it is instant sunshine.’ He offered the mirror again, as if it were chocolates.

‘No. Thank you.’

Oliver shook his head again, as if to say please yourself, then rolled the crackling note up into a narrow tube. With a sharp sniff at each nostril the white powder vanished from the mirror.

This time the tempo of their love-making was languid and dreamy. To Helen each movement seemed slower, as if replayed before her eyes by an unseen camera, but yet more piercingly sweet than she could have believed possible. The world beyond the little circle of firelight, beyond this coupling of tanned skin with her own pale translucent flesh, meant nothing.

This was Helen’s first experience of living for the moment, of being absorbed in the sensations of the instant, and she was transfixed by it. At last Oliver drifted into sleep with his head heavy against her breast. For a while Helen stared over the crest of blond hair into the greyness of the dead fire. Then she, too, closed her eyes, as if surrendering herself once again, and then slept with him.

It was very late when the black Jaguar slid alongside the steps leading down to Follies House.

Oliver switched off the engine and glanced sideways at Helen. Her chin was sunk against the collar of his coat which he had wrapped around her, and she seemed to be lost within her own thoughts.

‘Follies,’ he said, to nudge her back into awareness. ‘I told you I’d deliver you back, safe and sound.’

Helen stared at him, her face drained of colour by the orange street lights. Something in her expression made Oliver uneasy.