Helen flinched. As she stared back at Pansy, she felt the ugly flush deepening over her face and neck. It was so humiliating, that surprise, the more so because it was completely natural. What could Oliver, it said, with his looks and his charm and his position, see in a little mouse like you?

‘Yes,’ Helen said, finding defiance in the anger that threatened to choke her. ‘Me. Why not?’

Pansy was looking defensive now, her eyebrows pulled into a frown over the chameleon blue eyes, and a trace of hurt lingering about her vulnerable, flower-like mouth.

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that … you didn’t look or behave as if you belonged together.’

Belonged together? How Oliver would hate that, Helen realised. She was giving Pansy the wrong impression, making her undefined relationship with Oliver seem too formal, but it was too late to backpedal now.

‘I don’t want to tread on anybody’s toes,’ Pansy added, with such clear sincerity that Helen’s anger faded as quickly as it had come. After all, Pansy had done nothing yet, except exist.

‘It’s all right,’ she said wearily. ‘You aren’t. Nobody belongs to anybody. Forget it.’

‘Forget what?’

Chloe had come up the stairs without either of them hearing her. Now she was standing in the open doorway, almost striking a pose. She had one hand on her hip and the other was raised to coil the dark red hair into a knot on top of her head. The stance emphasised her height and slimness and for a moment as she stood there, it was Chloe who was the beauty and not Pansy.

Pansy’s sharp stare missed nothing.

‘Hello. You were at the audition too, weren’t you?’

‘Pansy,’ said Helen, ‘this is Chloe Campbell. Rose’s third tenant.’

There was a little, wary moment as the two women looked at each other. Then, immediately after the practised appraisal of attractive women confronting one another, came the answering smiles of complicity. To Helen, watching, it was as if they belonged to a desirable club from which she would be forever excluded. She was oppressed by a sense of her own plainness and dowdiness.

‘Forget what?’ Chloe was asking Helen again.

‘We were talking about Oliver Mortimore,’ Pansy said, before Helen could frame an answer. ‘Helen was kindly warning me off.’

Helen wished she could find something as lightly dismissive to say, but nothing came. Chloe felt the tension vibrating in the room and tactfully turned her attention to dispersing it.

‘Really?’ she said vaguely, feigning lack of interest as she wandered round Pansy’s room. There were arched windows with views of the river and Christ Church, and panelling and furniture similar to her own, but here everything was fresher and there were thick new carpets. Chloe peered through the adjoining doors. One led to a bedroom with a glimpse of a bathroom beyond, another revealed a tiny, compact kitchen.