It took Helen a moment to find an answer. ‘It was important, yes. It isn’t any more.’

Graham frowned, but he was old enough to see that she wouldn’t answer any more questions. After a moment Helen ruffled his hair, as she had often done when he was a little boy, and went away. In her own room, she stared at her reflection in the small mirror and tried to see how it had changed. Graham’s only thirteen, she thought. Is it so very obvious, even to him? For the first time since she had come home, she let herself think about Oliver and the sense of loss hit her like a blow.

It was going to take a long time to forget him.

Helen slipped back into Oxford after a week away.

From the train window, just as she had done at the beginning of term, she caught the brief glimpse of the distant spires. But this time, instead of glowing with reflected light, they were curtained with grey rain. Helen tried not to read significance into it, but it seemed an apt enough symbol. Compared with today the beginning of term lay brightly in her memory, promising everything.

It had brought Oliver, and a glimpse of happiness that she had never guessed at. But the light had faded, and the rain came to shroud the Oxford pinnacles.

The greyness was appropriate, she thought sadly. Oxford was still the same, and she was grateful to be coming back to the work she loved. But losing Oliver had extinguished the brilliance of the place for her. Extinguished it, she knew, except for a spark that refused to die. Her logical self told her that she should forget him, but she went on defiantly hoping that he might come back, and set everything alight again.

Helen tried half-heartedly to find somewhere else to live, but it was impossible at mid-term. And Follies drew her back, its square red bulk holding its own fascination as well as the promise and threat of meeting Oliver.

Even now, she longed to see him again.

Helen discovered that Rose had not re-let the little room at the top of the house, and so she took it over again. Then she threw herself with deliberate intensity into her work, vowing to make up for the time she had lost. For a few days she saw no-one but Chloe, who welcomed her back with real warmth. Then one morning she met Pansy in the shadowed gallery outside her room. Impulsively Pansy came running to her, put her arms around Helen and hugged her. Helen caught the scent of summer gardens again.

‘I’m so glad you’re back,’ Pansy told her. ‘Helen …’ her face was unusually serious, ‘are we still friends?’