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know. The sharpness of her tone made several people glance in their direction.
    ‘Well, as I said in my column last week, practically, I don’t think it will make a great deal of difference,’ Piers said, over-loudly, as if he were talking to a stranger.
    His coldness had always both repelled and fascinated her. When she first met him, a couple of years before, at one of the lunch parties the agency occasionally threw, to which they invited a selection of current opinion-formers, she had thought him amusing, in a conceited kind of way. He had a brilliantly sharp mind but the icy, untouchable beauty of a statue.
    The lunch had gone on until late in the afternoon. When the last of the other guests had drifted away, and her colleagues had gone back to their offices to pick up their messages, she had suddenly found herself alone in the circular boardroom with him. He had picked up the last claret bottle and, finding it empty, asked her if she would like to go for a drink somewhere else, and even though she instinctively did not like him, she was paradoxically flattered that he found her interesting enough to want to spend more time with.
    They found a musty basement wine bar and drank a lot of armagnac, laughing a great deal at each other’s wit, and a few hours later, when she took him home, at whose suggestion she had never been sure, she discovered that under a white shirt that smelt deliciously of starch his skin was smooth and warm, his body pliable, responsive to her touch.
    ‘I’m going to get another drink,’ Holly said. Piers followed her up to the kitchen at a suitably discreet distance.
    ‘Have you noticed that everyone has a least favourite cabinet minister they’re betting will lose his seat?’ she asked him, pouring herself another glass of claret. ‘My personal choice is Malcolm Rifkind, but there’s a lot of money on Ian Lang and some optimistic punters are even having a flutter on Michael Portillo.’
    ‘That’s good,’ he said, taking out his notepad again, ‘that’s very good.’
    She wondered why, after nearly two years, she still got a buzz when he praised something she said. It was so illogical. She was a successful woman, old enough to know better, young enough to do better, a feminist for God’s sake, enslaved in an affair with an arrogant, sexist shit, someone she knew was bad for her, but she couldn’t seem to give up. It was a bit like smoking.
    ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she asked Piers.
    ‘I thought you were quitting.’ He looked round quickly to check that no-one was within range of hearing such an injudiciously familiar comment.
    ‘I am, if Labour win,’ she told him.
    The Labour candidate in Edgbaston was making her victory speech.
    ‘When the people elect a German woman in a relatively safe seat, the Tories know their time’s up... enjoy this, it may be your last,’ Piers said, offering her a Marlboro, then, bringing his voice down to a whisper, ‘shall we go?’
    ‘You go if you want. I’m enjoying myself,’ Holly found it gave her rather a kick to see him denied, ‘anyway, I thought you were meant to be writing something about it.’
    ‘We could always watch the television at your place...’ Surreptitiously, he ran a finger down her spine.
    ‘I want to be with people... just another hour or so,’ she compromised.
    The mood at the party changed from excitement to euphoria. People had become so disillusioned, Holly thought, they had not even dared to hope for a better life. And now it was being offered, they did not yet know how to greet it. It was fashionable to be negative, to say that things wouldn’t change much anyway, to talk of the global economy and the powerlessness of government, but at some point between ten o’clock and one o’clock in the morning there was a subtle change of style and people started using words like renewal and regeneration as if they really meant something.
    ‘Extraordinary evening,’ Piers remarked, as they finally left the