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the street below.
    Bisley gazed at her for some seconds, as if registering her for the first time. ‘You are rather a sweet girl,’ he observed, without passion. ‘Yes, rather a sweet girl. One rarely sees true innocence. And do you know? I believe that you are that. An innocent.’
    Cora didn’t know whether to take this as an insult or a compliment. ‘I’m not a child,’ she told him.
    He nodded. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But you are one of Nature’s nice ones, I think.’ He smiled. ‘Poor little sheep,’ he added. ‘Why don’t you go back to deepest Dorset before you’re eaten up by all these bastards?’
    She bridled a little at the implication that she was too weak to stand up to London. ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here.’
    He gazed at her for another second, then held out his arm. It was a gesture that told her to go through the door and back downstairs. As she got up and walked over to him, he said, ‘You’ll come up here every day for an hour. You’ll read these books.’
    ‘All right,’ she murmured. ‘If you say so.’ Privately, she wondered if he was slightly mad.
    He let her walk down the flight of narrow stairs. When she paused at the bottom, he was looking down at her, stuffing the key into his waistcoat pocket and searching in the other for his cigarettes.
    ‘We’re going to warm your hands, Cora,’ he muttered. ‘If you insist upon being part of this roaring bloody beast called society, we’re going to expand that shrivelled brain of yours, if it kills us both in the process.’
    On the tube home, she decided that Bisley was eccentric. She rather disapproved of his talk of warming her hands at the fire of life. All his talk of writing. Certainly she agreed with him that writers were a mixed and uncertain lot. She had seen the people who came to the house: scruffy or strange, or both. One this week had looked like a bank clerk, very proper, quiet and neat; and yet the first two chapters of his novel, which she had been obliged to retype, were absolutely obscene.
    And look at Bisley.
    When had he warmed his hands at the fire of life? He didn’t have a family that she knew of. No one he ever mentioned, anyway. He didn’t seem to have any close friends. He didn’t write: he simply repackaged what other people wrote, and talked about it as if he’d breathed a spark into it. And that was his life. That was what she was supposed to warm her hands in front of, a life like that.
    Bisley wouldn’t know life if it jumped up and bit him, she thought, with all the vast experience of her nineteen years. She got up and waited for the tube doors to open.
    After three months, she went home to Sherborne for the weekend. It was June, the first time she had been back, and some friends of her parents were having a party to celebrate their silver wedding. There was a blessing in the abbey, and tea afterwards in a marquee.
    As she sat in the abbey, Cora realized how soothing it was, listening to the choir and the service, looking at the well-known faces. These people were polite and well meaning; they were kind. No one boasted; in fact, in the kind of society that Cora’s parents moved in, boasting was considered one of the deadliest sins. Even if one was accomplished, it was terribly bad form to mention it.
    She looked sideways at the profiles across the aisle. She wondered what they would make of Bisley, what they would say if they read some of what she typed for him. She could imagine her father frowning at the things she read in the attic room. She blushed beneath her fashionable hat, and clasped her hands in her lap.
    Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, say, maiden, wilt thou go with me ? whispered John Clare, in Cora’s mind. She had been reading him yesterday, while below Bisley cursed on the phone. Through the valley depths of shade and night …
    The hymn began to play. She stood up next to her parents and lowered her gaze to the book.
    The lips that kissed whispering