‘He was there last night,’ said Cameron.

‘Was he?’ said Patrick. ‘I only had eyes for you.’

They had reached the water meadows at the bottom of the wood. Here the snow had settled in roots of trees, in the crevices of walls, and in six-foot drifts anywhere it could find shelter from yesterday’s blizzard. The blizzard had also laid thick white tablecloths of snow fringed with icicles on either side of the stream which ran with chattering teeth down the valley. It was deathly quiet except for Rupert’s horses occasionally neighing to one another. But it was getting lighter.

‘Nice scent,’ said Patrick, burrowing his face in her neck. ‘What is it?’

‘Fracas.’

‘Very appropriate. Who gave it to you?’

‘Tony.’

‘Why hasn’t he got a neck?’ Patrick hurled a snowball into the woods. Gertrude hurtled after it. ‘You’d have thought with that much money he could have bought himself a neck.’

‘Shut up,’ said Cameron. ‘Tell me, do your mother and father always slope off to bed in the middle of their own parties?’

‘It’s a very odd marriage,’ said Patrick, pointing his new Leica at her. ‘Look towards the stream, darling. My father has always seen my mother as Maud Gonne.’

‘The woman Yeats was fixated on?’

‘Right. Yeats fell in love with her at exactly the same age my father fell in love with my mother. Look, badger tracks.’ Patrick bent down to examine them. ‘Maud Gonne was a rabid revolutionary. Yeats knew he wouldn’t impress her with poetry, so he got caught up in a political movement to unite Ireland. Then she married John MacBride, another revolutionary. Broke Yeats’s heart, but it made him write his best poetry. He claimed Maud Gonne was beyond blame, like Helen of Troy.’

‘But your mother isn’t a revolutionary, for Christ’s sake, and she hasn’t married someone else.’

‘No, but she has Maud Gonne’s tremendous beauty, and my father has an almost fatalistic acceptance that she’s above blame and will have affairs with other men.’

‘Doesn’t your mother care for him?’

‘In her way. I once asked her why she messed him about so much. She said that, with every woman in the world after him, she could only hold him by uncertainty.’

Cameron digested this.

‘But if he only loves her, and doesn’t want all these women, why can’t she stop playing games and love him back?’

‘That’s far too easy. She’s convinced that, once he’s sure of her, his obsession would evaporate. So the games go on.’

‘I wish they wouldn’t,’ said Cameron. ‘It sure makes him cranky to work with.’

She sat on a log and watched Patrick write ‘Patrick loves Cameron’ in huge letters in the snow. Then he got out his hip flask, now filled with brandy, and handed it to her.

‘You warm enough?’

Cameron nodded, taking a sip.

‘Do you have a drinking problem?’ she asked, as Patrick took a huge slug.

Patrick laughed. ‘Only if I can’t afford it. Whisky’s twelve pounds a bottle in Dublin. Will you come and stay with me at Trinity next term?’

It’s crazy, thought Cameron. He’s utterly unsuitable and eight years younger than me, but the snow had given her such a feeling of irresponsibility, she hadn’t felt so happy for years. The only unsettling thing was that he reminded her so much of Declan. They had the same arrogance, the same assumption that everyone would dance to their tune. Patrick seemed to read her thoughts.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not at all like my father. Being Capricorn, I have a very shrewd business head. I may be overexacting, but I’m also cool, calculating and calm, whereas my father is very highly strung and overemotional. Capricorns also have excellent senses of humour and make protective and loving husbands.’ He grinned at her. The violet shadows beneath the brilliant dark eyes were even more pronounced this morning, but nothing could diminish the beauty of the bone structure, the full slightly sulky curve of the mouth, or the thickness of the long dark eyelashes.

‘Not a very artistic sign, Capricorn,’ Cameron said crushingly.

‘What about Mallarme?’ said Patrick. ‘One of the bravest, most dedicated of poets. He was Capricorn. He knew what slog and self-negation is needed to produce poetry. He understood the loneliness of the writer. Look, here’s the sun.’

Hand in hand they watched the huge red sun climbing up behind the black bars of the beech copse on the top road, blushing at its inability to warm the day.

‘Looks like Charles Fairburn spending a night inside for soliciting,’ said Patrick.

‘God, I wish I had a crew,’ said Cameron. ‘D’you realize you can only afford to film sunrises in winter in this country? In summer it rises at four o’clock in the morning. That’s in golden time, when you have to pay a crew miles over the rate for working through the night. Christ, I hate the British unions.’

Patrick turned towards her. ‘I only like American-Irish unions. Let me look at you.’

Her dark hair, no longer sleeked back with water, was blown forward in black tendrils over her cheek bones, and in a thick fringe which softened the slanting yellow eyes, and the beaky nose. Her skin and her full pale lips were amber in the sunshine.

Patrick sighed and took another photograph. ‘Even the sun’s upstaged. You’re so dazzling, he’ll have to wear dark glasses to look at you.’

Cameron laughed. He’d be terribly easy to fall in love with, she was shocked to find herself thinking.

‘How many more terms have you got?’ she asked as they wandered back.

‘Two.’

‘What are your future goals?’

‘To take you to bed when we get home.’

‘Don’t be an asshole! Apart from that?’

‘Get a first, then write plays.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that. I’ve started one already.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Intimidation — by British soldiers in Ulster.’

‘You’re crazy — neither the BBC nor ITV would touch it, particularly in an election year. Nor will the West End.’

‘Broadway would, and a success there would come here.’

‘Very self-confident, aren’t you?’

‘Not particularly. I just know what I want from life.’

He moved closer, putting his hands inside the three jerseys warming them on her small breasts.

‘I want you most.’

Back at The Priory, people were beginning to surface. Bas, having put so many Alka Seltzers in a glass of water they’d fizzed over the top, was trying to find his overcoat. Caitlin was eating Alpen and reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Taggie was serving breakfast to Simon Harris’s monsters, trying to give the baby its bottle and comfort Simon Harris who was sobbing at the kitchen table with his face in his hands.

‘Oh Patrick, thank goodness you’re back,’ she said. ‘Could you possibly ring the doctor about. .’ She nodded in Simon Harris’s direction.

‘No,’ said Patrick, backing out of the kitchen. ‘Sorry, darling, I’m busy.’

‘I’m going home to call the office and get some sleep,’ said Cameron.

‘No,’ said Patrick, suddenly frantic. ‘If we go to sleep it won’t be my birthday any more and we’ll break the spell.’

He took her up the winding stairs to his bedroom in the east turret, which was painted dazzlingly white, as though the snow had fallen inside. There were no carpets or curtains, and the only furniture was a desk, a chair, a green and white sofa piled high with books, and a vast red-curtained oriental four-poster with bells hanging from the tops of the posts. The view, however, was magnificent, straight across the valley and up to Penscombe. You could see the weathercock on top of the church spire glittering in the sunlight.

A volume of Keats lay open on the bed: the pages were covered with pencilled notes. Picking it up, Cameron crawled under the duvet and tried to decipher Patrick’s writing. Looking up, she saw the ceiling was painted dove grey with little stars picked out in white.

If only she’d had a room like this when she was young, she thought bitterly. Patrick went off to get them some breakfast. He took longer than anticipated. Taggie was on the telephone ringing up some doctor about Simon Harris, but she ran after him and buttonholed him as he was going back upstairs with a tray, dragging him into the sitting-room, distraught that he had Cameron in his room.

‘She’s Tony Baddingham’s c-c-concubine.’

‘Is that your word for the day?’ said Patrick coldly.

‘No, that’s what Daddy calls her. Do you want to ruin his career?’

‘Tony B couldn’t be that petty, firing a megastar like Pa, just because I took his mistress off him.’

‘He could! He’s really evil!’

‘Well if he’s that evil, Pa shouldn’t be working for him. Now, get out of my way, sweetheart. The coffee’s getting cold.’

‘And I’ve had enough of entertaining your friends,’ Taggie screamed after him.

‘Bicker, bicker,’ said Caitlin, looking up from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ‘Pity it isn’t Spring, then Cameron could festoon your willy with forget-me-nots. Oh my God,’ she screamed, as an ashen Daysee Butler shuffled downstairs in a white towelling dressing-gown. ‘It’s The Priory ghost.’

Upstairs, Patrick found Cameron wearing his new red and silver dressing-gown and reading Keats. The sun shining through the stained glass of one of the windows had turned her face emerald, ruby and violet like a nymph of the rainbow. Patrick felt his heart fail.

He had brought up croissants, Taggie’s bramble jelly, a bunch of green grapes, a jug of Buck’s Fizz and some very strong black coffee. Cameron, who’d had no dinner the night before, was starving and ate most of it. It was astonishing, thought Patrick, that she looked desirable even with croissant crumbs on her lips. But even the black coffee couldn’t keep her awake for long. Patrick didn’t sleep. He sat making notes on Keats, which was one of his set books, but spending more time gazing at her. In sleep her face lost all its aggression.