“I’ve moved. They didn’t send on my letters.”

I told him I had dropped out of the Grand Union Polytechnic and become a gardener. The shock that piece of news gave him was plain to see. When his face was flushed he looked more than ever like Andrew Lane.

“Don’t you think you should have done what I suggested and come and worked for my father?”

“I won’t be a gardener forever,” I said. “But I might be sitting behind a desk forever if I became a secretary. Besides, Guy, can you see me in an office?”

I was in my usual garb, jeans and trainers, a T-shirt with a face or an animal or slogan on it. My hair had grown very long, a great black cloak of it hanging halfway down my back. Needless to say, perhaps, no makeup ever touched my face or varnish my nails and I smelled of Camay soap. He looked at me and said, “I can see you anywhere. I mean, in a dress and nice shoes and—well, I don’t know, the things girls wear.” That made me laugh, but he was quite serious. “You’d always look lovely to me, Clodagh.”

I’d have to tell him, I realized that, and I was seeking about for a form of words when he suggested we take the boat trip from Jason’s Wharf to Camden Lock. If we walked up there now we could catch the eleven-thirty boat. Or how about dinner that evening or tomorrow or the next night? Or dinner on all of them, he said.

“I can’t go on a boat trip, Guy. I have to go and be a gardener. Besides”— I looked at him, knowing he’d be hurt—“I have to tell you I’m living with someone at Fifteen Russia Road. I met him in April.”

He nodded. “It was inevitable. Will it last?”

What a question. For a moment I disliked him for asking it. “I don’t know. How should I know? I think it will.”

“If we got engaged,” he said, “I wouldn’t ask you to live with me. I wouldn’t think it right.” I could think of no answer to that. “You might change your mind about this—this friend of yours. If you do, I want to be there.”

I kissed him as we parted, though it was he not I who made that kiss intense. I broke away from him, shaking my head.

“Can I still write to you sometimes?”