Without apparently hearing the comment, Kershaw went on. “Our relationship—and I am not talking of a love affair—began when I was in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and saw Candace. She had come up in the Michaelmas term. She seemed anxious to chat, which was unusual, and I invited her to have coffee with me. Without her father she seemed to come alive. She talked and I listened. We agreed to meet again and it became something of a habit for me to drive to Oxford when she was there and take her for lunch outside the city. We were both energetic walkers and I looked forward to those autumnal meetings and our drives into the Cotswolds. We only had sex once, on an unusually warm afternoon, lying in the wood under a canopy of sunlit trees, when I suppose a combination of beauty and the seclusion of the trees, the warmth, our contentment after what had been a good lunch, led to the first kiss and from that to the inevitable seduction. I think afterwards we both knew it was a mistake. And we were perceptive enough about ourselves to know how it had happened. She’d had a bad week at college and was in need of comfort, and the power to confer comfort is seductive—and I don’t mean merely physically. She was feeling sexually inadequate, alienated from her peers, and, whether she realised it or not, was looking for an opportunity to lose her virginity. I was older, kind, fond of her, available, the ideal partner for a first sexual experience, which she both wanted and feared. She could feel safe with me.