The river traffic thinned and the noise levels dropped and the sounds of summer took over. Water splashed, pigeons sounded, there was an occasional blast from a tinny-sounding transistor radio. Rising from clumps of honeysuckle was the hum of foraging honey bees. From the large, working farmyard came an aroma of dried mud, and a fainter one of horse.

The unused muscles in Laure’s legs and buttocks made themselves felt. Sun beat down onto her hands and her back. Would she get freckles? She didn’t care.

Tomas was in front of her, which granted Laure the luxury of watching him unimpeded and she registered each detail greedily. His left foot turned inward on the pedal. His forearms were burnt deep brown. His hair had been roughly cut at the nape.

From time to time, Tomas looked back to check she was OK, a gesture that gave her more pleasure than she could ever imagine.

‘Fancy a swim?’ he called over his shoulder as they approached a bridge. He wheeled right and led her alongside a tributary flowing into the main river.

They rode upstream for a mile or so. Here it was to venture into a landscape that had enchantment laid on it. Apart from the sky, river, trees and birds, there was nothing. No one. This was solitude that couldn’t be far removed from the garden of Eden, she thought, awestruck by the silence, by its intrinsic other world-ness.

Poplars grew down to the water’s edge, their roots creating a gradient that would make it possible to get in and out of the water. Tomas parked his bike and, with a groan, dismounted.

‘Out of condition?’ Teasing Tomas was a delight – because he didn’t always like it.

For a second, he was disconcerted. Then he wasn’t. He caught her by the wrist. ‘You witch.’

The river sent ripples against its banks. In the field behind Laure, the bone-dry crops rattled and rustled against each other and birds on the watch for insects and grain dived earthwards and rose back into the air with piercing cries.

She wanted to lay her head on Tomas’s hot body and to listen to his heartbeat. She wanted to kiss the purple bruise that had sprouted on his arm and to splash water over their hot feet.

How visceral her responses were these days, she reflected, amazed at the way her mind now operated. They were about sex, the flesh, sensation… and all about the other thing which had violently seized her. Love.

‘Coming?’ Tomas stripped off his shirt and stepped out of his trousers.

Her fingers were not quite steady as she unzipped her shorts and eased off her shirt.

‘You look like an ice cream,’ she said. ‘All pale here…’ She touched his groin, ‘but so brown here.’ She laid her hand flat against his chest, searching for the heartbeat.