She clutched him, for balance as well as for passion. He half withdrew from her, and then pushed himself inside her again, even deeper this time, into the secrecy of her body. And he didn’t stop. He didn’t suddenly shudder and roll off her, as Walter had always done. He kept pushing into her, rhythmic and forceful, again and again and again, until she began to wonder if she was going to be able to stand it. Her senses seemed to jumble up. She heard him panting. She heard the odd crunching sound of the horse-hair mattress. She thought she heard laughter, too, but it wasn’t his, it came from a faraway world of propriety and trifling flirtations.

Most of all, though, she felt the tingling in her body, as effervescent as soda, as fresh as snow. And Collis kept on pushing and pushing and pushing, arousing her far beyond anything she had imagined possible, so that she no longer cared about adultery or decorum or God, or even who she was, or why, and so that she no longer knew where she was or what was happening to her.

She might have screamed. She might have imagined screaming. She could feel a miraculous pressure building up, and she didn’t know whether she wanted it to break or not, for it would surely overwhelm her, and even bury her like a violent earthquake. Yet how could she hold it back, with that taut, tight touching that wouldn’t stop?

But it wasn’t an earthquake that overwhelmed her at the end. It was an abrupt awareness of reality, that what was happening wasn’t an earthquake at all. It was the vivid understanding that she was in a dark and unfamiliar hotel room, and that she was making love with a man who wasn’t her husband. A young, virile man who was already deep inside her, and whom she craved to have even deeper inside her, so much that she was lifting her hips towards him in a way that was outrageous for a woman of any decency.

Finally her fears and inhibitions began to teeter around her like a building on the verge of collapse, swaying on the uncertain foundations of guilt, and duty, and wifely fortitude, dropping cornices and window ledges and showers of roof tiles, until Collis gasped, and she felt a sudden bulge and pulse, and the whole edifice of Hannah’s life seemed to come thundering down in a tumult of days and years and months, of smashed photographs and broken friendships, of ripped-away responsibilities and torn hearts.

‘At last you’re mine,’ said Collis softly, and kissed her.