Christopher Piper, like Marnie, wrote in the present tense to describe the overwhelming impression that his first sight of the great stone figures on the northern porch of Chartres Cathedral had made on him when he’d first seen them as a schoolboy, giving him a sense of awe and an acute awareness of something ‘other’ which he’d never forgotten. ‘But I’d also just read The Hound of Heaven, which I was studying in English for my GCSEs,’ he said drily when he’d finished reading, ‘so I was ripe for indulging in the fancy that I was being pursued by the divine. Not a feeling that’s persisted.’

Louisa looked at him in surprise. It was not at all the sort of thing she had expected from him. She wondered if he really had once been a monk, as Isobel had suggested over tea last night.

‘I think you have material for a poem in that bit of prose, Christopher,’ Catherine told him seriously, ‘but I suspect you already know that yourself.’

‘Perhaps.’ He looked pleased. ‘I hope so . . . I shall work on it, anyway. It’s interesting to write about a subject not of one’s own choosing.’ He grinned, suddenly. ‘That hasn’t happened to me for years – very salutary!’

Stanley Heslington was the only person not prepared to read out what he had written – possibly some people suspected because he hadn’t actually written anything. Win looked agonised. ‘I feel I’ve got a bit beyond all this elementary stuff,’ Stanley said – an announcement that was greeted in stony silence by the rest of the group. He looked round defiantly, spoiling for an argument, clearly expecting pressure to be brought to make him change his mind, so that Catherine’s cool: ‘That’s perfectly all right, Stanley. It’s completely voluntary,’ as she moved swiftly on to the next person, did not please him at all.

‘Now, Louisa, it’s your turn,’ said Catherine, thinking that the bubbly young woman, whose confident vivacity seemed at odds with the fine-drawn fragility of her physique, looked surprisingly nervous. She had noted Louisa’s sudden loss of equilibrium the previous evening, but that was nothing particularly unusual. During her years of tutoring, Catherine had got used to witnessing sudden emotional upheavals, even in the most unexpected people, when they started exploring a part of their past which they usually kept firmly submerged. ‘Will you finish the session for us? It’s always especially hard to go either first or last, but I hope you’ll let us hear what you’ve managed to do.’

‘Yes of course,’ said Louisa, determined that if Marnie had been brave enough to go first, she was certainly not going to refuse to be last, and not wishing to put herself in the same uncooperative camp as Stanley Heslington either. She took a deep breath, looked at her notebook and began: