‘I don’t need it,’ Chloe had whispered into his thick, black hair. ‘What I need is you. Again.’ And his hands had moved across her belly and between her legs once more with unquestioning assurance. In the first pleasure of the moment Chloe had forgotten his words, but later they kept coming back to her. She thought about them when she recognised the uncomfortable feeling that permeated her life as boredom, and she remembered them again when she realised one day that she wasn’t interested in the challenge of pitching for a major new account. She felt that she was running along in comfortable, well-oiled grooves, and that she wasn’t thinking about anything, any more. She began to be afraid that even falling in love with Leo had been no more than a way of filling the vacuum that yawned in the centre of her life.

Another day she had pushed aside the story boards for a new bra commercial and typed a letter to the Principal of an Oxford College, making the choice just because she had seen the College featured in a magazine.

‘That’s that,’ she thought. ‘The answer will be no, of course.’

But with surprising speed, the letter had led to an interview with the austere Principal in her book-lined drawing room. Then, after some hasty reading, there had been papers to write on Victorian novelists and Romantic poets. She had been interviewed again, making her joke to her friends that she felt that she was being looked over for the chairmanship of Saatchi and Saatchi, not a commoner’s place at an obscure women’s College. At last the Principal had told her: ‘We have a policy here, Miss Campbell, of accepting mature students and other unusual folk. You’re more mature than most, of course, and you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. But we think you’ll make a useful contribution of College life, even if you turn out not to have a first-class mind. Would you like to come up this October?’

At first, going to Oxford had been no more than a teasing idea for Chloe. She had wanted to prove to Leo that she could win a place, and she had wanted to show him that it impressed her so little that she could turn it down without a second thought. Then she had found herself enjoying the preparation for the entrance papers, hurrying home to dig poetry books out of the inner pocket of her briefcase instead of going out to cocktails and dinners with friends from the agency. She had started to use the cool, remote thought of Oxford as an antidote for her grating London world.

Yet, even so, when the moment finally came she was shocked to hear herself saying, ‘Thank you, Dr Hale. I’ll do my very best. And I’d like to start in October.’