‘I wish you’d told me first.’

‘I didn’t think of it. I forget about it all the time. It really wasn’t a big deal.’

‘OK.’

‘So that’s all right? It doesn’t bother you?’

What could he have said? That she was the one who needed to consider the question of bother? That she was setting him a trap, forcing him to say it didn’t bother him simply because she claimed it didn’t bother her? But those had been the early days, when he had not yet found the footing from which to challenge her sense of the world. He had mainly wanted to get her back to her room, out of her clothes.

It began on a school ski trip to France when I was sixteen. T. was twenty-six. All the sixth-formers were allowed to stay up drinking in the hotel bar with the teachers in the evenings, and T. and I talked a lot, longer and longer each night as the week progressed. He was young, he was handsome and lively, all the other girls fancied him too, but he wanted to talk to me. We were staying up till midnight, one o’clock. I can’t remember what the conversations were about now. I just remember the feeling of blossoming under his attention like a dried flower in a glass of warm water. Eventually, on the last night, when we were the last two people in the bar, he put his arms around me and said, in a bewildered sort of way, What are we doing? I didn’t dare move in case he took his arms away. Back in England, we began to meet up, a couple of evenings a week, at pubs on the other side of the city. When the pubs kicked out we would walk in the woods. We held one another. We talked. We kissed. Sometimes we lay down, if we could find a spot where that was possible, but we never undressed: the most I experienced of his body was his hot stomach and the small of his back when my hands could find their way beneath his shirt. It was the same with me: little portions of my skin were on offer, but nothing more. Sometimes he touched my breasts through my clothes. Sometimes I felt the lump in his jeans press against me, but I never touched him there and he never encouraged me to. In the whole time we were seeing each other, which lasted about five months, we had one full night together, when we went away for the weekend, Saturday to Sunday, to the Lakes, to a B&B. My parents knew – in a fit of guilt I’d told them – and once the storm blew over my mother at my request had taken me to buy a new bra and knickers. The ones I chose were lace and satin in an oxblood colour. In the bedroom of the B&B, T. saw the strap of the bra poking out of my T-shirt, and he touched it and said, What’s this?, because in all our time together he had never glimpsed a strap that colour. I felt embarrassed, like I had been caught out in a lie, pretending to be someone I wasn’t. The room was cold and quiet. It was unspoken between us that we were going to have sex that night. I was afraid. I think he was too. We dropped our bags and went to the pub instead. We picked at some food. We got a bit drunk. Then we went back to the room early and undressed one another very shyly and stood there kissing, holding one another. He kept sighing, as if he was sad. Eventually we moved to the bed. I was trying to do the right thing. I went down on him for a while, the first time I’d ever done it, just sucking instead of moving my head up and down. Eventually he drew me back up towards him. He put a condom on. He got on top of me, and tried to enter me, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t hard enough. I tried touching him through the condom but that just seemed to make things worse. He rolled away. He said, I’m sorry, C (he called me C). I said it was fine, it was fine. I wanted above all to be reassuring. Perhaps I had read about this in a magazine – the need to minimise pressure on ‘your man’. We cuddled for a while. Soon he fell asleep, but I’d never shared a bed with anyone before. I lay awake for hours, tingling with nearness, trying not to move, not to breathe. We spent the next day looking around the town, holding hands, enjoying our anonymity this far from home. We kissed by the lake. We never mentioned what had happened in the night. Then he drove us back in the afternoon and dropped me at my parents’ house. I walked in proudly, displaying myself to them as a girl who was old enough to make her own decisions, to get herself back in one piece.