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about your family,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know where you’re from or how long you’d lived in Oxford or anything.’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she said shortly. ‘I never want to talk about that.’
    She said no more and shortly afterwards began to cry.
    She didn’t sob or wail. Her grief was horribly discreet but as persistent and almost as silent as bleeding from an unstitched wound. He drove on in silence, glancing across at her, letting her cry. He believed it was healthy to let people cry – friends and onlookers were always far too ready to stifle grief with handkerchiefs and dubious comfort. But he also let her cry because her weeping somehow filled the car with the scent of her and he found it intoxicating. He noted how she didn’t apologize fromtime to time, the way weepers usually did, as though their crying were a breach in decorum, like belching or hiccupping. Her flow of tears and occasional sniffs and nose-blowing were so regular, so placid almost, it was as though they were not simply beyond her control but beneath her notice.
    After an hour, by which time her grief was threatening to mist up the windows, he stopped in a village on the pretext of buying petrol and bought her some tissues along with some ham sandwiches and two bottles of pale ale. He was prepared for her to wave the offer of food and drink away but he returned to the car to find her quite recovered and, she said, as hungry as a horse.
    She ate her share of the sandwiches ravenously, poring over the road map, then suggested it might be a good idea if he gave her the pills the hospital doctor had prescribed. Remembering the doctor’s orders, he shook out two of the pills into his hand and passed them over.
    ‘I need three,’ she said.
    ‘But the label says –’
    ‘I’ve been taking these, or versions of them, since I was a little girl,’ she said drily. ‘I think I know a little more about psychiatric medication than you do. Give me the bottle.’
    He held back.
    ‘Oh it’s OK, Tony,’ she said with a defeated sort of smile that gave him goosebumps. ‘I won’t do anything silly. Not now. Not now you’ve rescued me.’
    She took a third pill, washed all three down expertly with a swig of pale ale, made him pause outside the village so she could relieve herself behind a hedge then fell asleep.
    It was late at night, nearly one, when they arrived at his grandfather’s house. Tony carried their suitcases into the dark and silent building, where his grandfather would long since have gone to bed, then gently woke her, taking the car blanket off her lap and draping it round her shoulders against the chill before he led her in. Perhaps from sleep, perhaps from pills (of which she had taken three more when they stopped at Exeter for supper) she was as solemn and wordless as a sleepy child. He showed her where the bathroom was then led her to a spare room, his mother’s room, where his grandfather would expect a female guest to be lodged. She gave a little whimper of exhaustion and pleasure on seeing the bed so neatly made in readiness and started to undress so quickly he left her at once.
    The idiocy of what he had done struck him only on waking from a deep and dreamless sleep. He had grown used to waking slowly in Oxford to the distant groan and chink of a punctual milk float then the muffled bell of the college clock and finally the alarm clock of the heavily sleeping research fellow in the room beside him. In Penzance the first cackle of seagulls woke him shortly after dawn. He would gladly have rolled over and slept again but nagging worry and a creeping sense of doom kept him awake and staring from his pillows at the too-familiar room, still so full of boyhood that it seemed to mock him for thinking he could become a man so easily.
    He had thrown in his future for what? The thin promise of a badly paid teaching post in the town he had thought to escape and the still narrower possibility of a relationship