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on the only other upholstered chair and stretched out his legs and smiled at her over the top of his wine glass. For a moment he didn’t answer. Then in slow deliberate tones he explained himself.
    ‘The fact is, I really do care about the work I’m doing. Quite a lot, actually. But I don’t see why anyone else should care. So rather than bore people or embarrass them I’ve learned not to talk about it.’
    Laura felt a small but distinct shock. It was strange to her that these precious first moments could have any other content than their perceptions of each other. Close on the shock came shame. She had assumed that any conversation that took place between them was a cover for another sort of dialogue. Do you like me? Do I like you? Might you love me? Might I love you? And here he was wanting to talk about his dissertation.
    ‘I’d like to know. Really.’
    Anything to avoid having to talk herself. When she was nervous she chattered like a fool. And right now she was extremely nervous. He was so calm and still, his few movements so deliberate, and all she wanted to do was wriggle and scratch. It was like being a child in church.
    ‘I’m writing about landscape art. I’m writing about Arcadia.’
    He paused to see how she took this. She nodded as if she understood, which she didn’t.
    ‘About Arcadia in art, and Arcadia as a concept. People think of Arcadia as part of the classical furniture, as if it’s a myth that we’ve long outgrown. I don’t think so. I think it’s as powerful as it’s ever been. Partly because it’s pre-Christian. It’s the anti-Garden of Eden. There’s no serpent in Arcadia, there’s no forbidden fruit, no original sin. It’s the pastoral idyll, the world before towns and cities and, oh, you know, the dark satanic mills and so forth. For centuries artists painted imaginary scenes of Arcadia, using bits and pieces of real countryside, a shady grove of trees, a murmuring spring, a group of contented peasants watching over sheep. Then they started painting real countryside, but it was still really Arcadia. All those Constables everyone loves so much, they’re real places, but they’re not the only reality of rural England in the early nineteenth century. There was poverty, and disease, and premature death. He could have horrified us. But who wants to be horrified? So he painted England as Arcadia.’
    He stopped, afraid that he had talked too much.
    ‘More wine.’
    Her glass was empty. She had no recollection of having drunk it. He refilled both their glasses.
    ‘You did ask.’
    Apologizing for the lecture.
    ‘No. I’m really interested.’
    She was, too. Not in Arcadia, but in his passionate engagement with his subject. All the time listening to him she had been tracking her response, amazed that he could talk to her like this, now, when all that was vivid and immediate to her was his response to her and hers to him. Did he not feel this too? And if not, was it arrogance? Indifference? Surely she hadn’t misread the signals so totally. The unsigned note left in her pigeon-hole most of all. But perhaps he had lost interest in her as soon as he had been sure of her response. There were men like that. Or close up she had proved to be a disappointment.
    Laura’s fear was that she was pretty but not sexy.
    She drank her wine too fast.
    ‘So you see,’ he said, ‘I’m lost in Arcadia these days, which makes me very poor company. When you spend all day contemplating the earthly paradise you do get a bit spacey.’
    He took a cigarette out of a shiny blue packet.
    ‘Smoke?’
    She accepted, glad to have something to do with her hands. He struck a match for her. They leant towards each other for him to light her cigarette, the shared action so intimate, so sensual. His flame, her breath.
    The harsh smoke hurt her throat. She was unused to French cigarettes. She inhaled and felt light-headed.
    ‘I should stay in your earthly paradise if I were you,’ she said. ‘I’m