All the way back to Follies House, she held herself rigid, as if she was afraid that something inside her might split and spill, messily, in front of the strangers who were passing by.

As last she reached the house. There was no-one there, and not a sound to be heard. As she went up she counted the stairs, numbering them off in her head to stop having to think about anything else. Only when she had unlocked her door and bolted it behind her, did she feel safe enough and private enough to cry.

She stumbled to the bed and, almost gratefully, let the tears come. Helen rarely cried, but now she abandoned herself to it. The storm of weeping that overtook her was not just for Oliver, but for herself too. Disjointed images and phrases flitted through her head with the shaking sobs. She saw Oliver’s face in the firelight at the Montcalm cottage.

He was so beautiful, and so gentle then.

She remembered the exhilaration of being driven at speed in his Jaguar and the prickle of champagne in her mouth.

Nothing like him has ever happened to me before. And never will again.

The excitement she had felt at simply being close to him was still with her.

I didn’t make demands on him.

But she had not been brilliant enough to keep him.

How could I, after he’d seen Pansy?

And, again,

It isn’t fair.

Alone in the dark, Helen cried as if she could never stop. But at last no more tears would come. Still in the same position, cold and cramped, she stared unseeingly upwards and forced herself to think.

She knew that she had walked into this loss with open eyes. She remembered thinking I don’t care what happens. I just want him now. She had relished the reckless thrill that the thought had given her.

So what had happened, had happened.

She saw now that it had been inevitable from the moment that Pansy had walked into the audition. The only surprising thing was that the scene she had just watched hadn’t happened before. It was unlikely, she thought bitterly, that they had held themselves apart for her sake.

Helen shrugged hopelessly.

What now? Somehow, however bleakly, life would have to go on.

Suddenly, and with eerie vividness, she saw her father’s face.

‘If this is the very worst thing that ever happens to you,’ she heard him saying in the flat, familiar voice that she missed so much, ‘you’ll be a very lucky girl.’

‘Poor Dad,’ Helen whispered out loud. ‘Poor all of us.’

At once, just as if she had been able to step outside herself for an instant, the enormity of Oliver shrank and slipped away from her. She saw him almost as a stranger, a blond young man with the features of a medieval knight and the easy smile of an indulged child.