'My mother just loves it with a grim determination,' said Alice and let out a burst of sudden laughter, 'Oh, oh, I'm mean, mean-'

'Yes,' Cecily said, looking at her with great liking, 'you are. Now, you had better tell me all about her and your clever father. I fear you have come into a gravely illiterate household. I believe my husband reads nothing but newspapers and engineering periodicals, Martin reads nothing but colour supplements and his brother Anthony reads nothing at all. What about you?'

Alice put her cup down carefully and lay back again in the cane chair.

'Love stories. I'm mad on love. Do you think it's the answer?'

'Now that,' Cecily said, thinking of her son Martin, 'is something you will have to find out for yourself.'

Even as a baby, a brand new baby, Martin had looked faintly anxious. He was a pretty baby and then a dear little boy and then an attractive bigger boy and finally he emerged as a sturdy, fair, good-looking man. But he still looked anxious. If you were in a good mood, Cecily always thought, you wanted to comfort that anxiety away, but if you were not, his expression resembled the silent reproachful pleading of a dog who has nothing to do all day but beseech you for a walk you haven't time to give it. She loved Martin very much but she didn't want him with her a great deal; she never had. He was undeniably rather dull, but she wouldn't have minded that. It was his want of boldness she found so discouraging, his unadventurousness, his lack of curiosity. Bringing this uncommon girl down was the most enterprising thing he had done in twenty-four years of life. Not only had he brought her down, but he was handling her beautifully. Cecily would have expected him to be too eager, too slavish, but he wasn't. He was quite challenging in fact, and even though Cecily suspected him of being besotted, he gave little hint of it. Alice had the same bold, free manner with him; there were no longing glances or furtive looks. When Anthony came home, later, for dinner the first evening, Alice took almost no notice of him at all even though he was dramatically rude in order to attract her attention. He was so rude that his father, roused from his inner world at the far end of the table, said suddenly, 'Leave the room.'

'Father-'

'Leave the room.'

Anthony turned to his mother.

'Go on,' she said.

'This is barbaric-'

'Leave the room,' Richard Jordan said, and suddenly there was a bull-like threatening look on his face. Anthony got up.

'What will Alice-' He stopped. They were all watching him. He left.

Cecily seemed quite unmoved.

'I believe a Frenchwoman has written a book describing how she finally got rid of her five sons. I must buy a copy.'

Martin did not try to come to Alice's room that night. She had thought he might and had rather hoped he wouldn't. She had been to bed twice with men before, once when she was seventeen to see what it was like and get the first time over with, and once six months before, driven by a simple physical longing to be made love to. She had, somewhat inevitably, preferred the second time, but neither had been what she was hoping for, which she put down to not being in love with either man. She was quite clear that she wasn't in love with Martin either, and so didn't want sex with him to become some litmus paper test. But she thought, lying there in linen sheets in her charming room while a disgracefully theatrical copper harvest moon hung outside, that she would very much like some good sex. She would like to be taken over by some huge physical force inside herself and feel every atom of her body as a body. One of the lecturers at the art school - rather a creep, in fact - had said that good sex made you a better painter. Alice had thought about this and finally had dismissed it as a very sixties view. What about Toulouse Lautrec and Van Gogh for starters? What Alice really wanted to know, she decided, her hands flat on her cotton nightie-clad belly, was what an orgasm really felt like, what it did to you. Then she could stop wondering.

She turned on her side, and slid both hands between her thighs. This was the most wonderful place she had ever been to. If Martin asked her to marry him tomorrow, standing perhaps in the creeper-clad stableyard while the white pigeons flew erratically about in the blue air above them, she would say yes. Then she could always come here and, best of all, Cecily would be her mother-in-law. She began to giggle, helplessly, out of happiness and excitement, and Martin, standing in the dark passage outside her door, was very nearly, but not quite, brave enough to come in and ask her what she was up to.

He knew he wanted to marry her. He knew it the moment her brother Josh had pushed open the back bedroom door in that grim house in Reading, and there was Alice in black and red striped tights and a vast blue smock smeared all over with paint and her hair screwed up on top with a paintbrush thrust through it, painting away in a terrible temper. He didn't even look at what she was painting, he was so busy looking at her. He had never seen anyone who looked so - so vital. She flung herself at Josh, who seemed equally pleased to see her. And then they had carried her off to Oxford and Martin had felt that his little Mini was absolutely pulsing with interest and life even though Alice didn't say much. She just sat in the back and existed, and occasionally he glanced in the driving mirror at her and felt his guts melt. This was something.

He found she gave him courage. He could dare with her, conversation with her was a kind of game. He realized, leaving a pub with her ten days later, that he didn't even feel dull or conventional, he felt brilliant. He grew afraid that if he didn't make her his, for ever, that brilliance would go, he would go back to being the dear, ordinary old Martin who fussed about train times and driving conditions and made his mother - however she strove to conceal it - visibly sigh. Asking Alice down to Dummeridge was a brainwave, an absolute corker of an idea, and now here was Alice adoring the house and getting on with his mother like a house on fire. And even his father... Anthony had once said, in a rage, that living with their father was like living in a house where the biggest and best room was always locked, and though Martin, by nature both conventional and loyal, was distressed by the image, he recognized the truth of it. His father wasn't exactly dull, he was just ruthlessly private, but he was watching Alice, Martin could see that, and what was more, he liked her. Being Alice - Martin felt himself dissolve at the thought - she didn't appear to notice that Richard was withdrawn. She talked to him, and so he talked back. He smiled at her. The only person she ignored was Anthony and that was Anthony's own stupid fault, all that capering and showing off to attract her attention, trying to impress her by bitching the parents. It was the first time, the first glorious time in Martin's life, that he had scored over Anthony, that he had something Anthony wanted that he couldn't have, that he had found something of real stupendous quality that his father and his mother applauded him for. He was ten feet tall. He was a new, a different man. If he could keep Alice, everything would fall into place from now on, there would be a goal, a future, he would work for her.

With stupendous self-control, and guided by a subtlety of instinct he had never experienced before but which he entirely trusted to, he did not propose to Alice for three months. They saw each other every week, and two weekends a month he arrived in Reading with russet or mauve chrysanthemums for Mrs Meadows ('Only get her hideous flowers,' Alice said. 'She despises pretty ones.') and drove Alice down to Dummeridge. He had a half-gun in a local shoot, and sometimes Alice went with him, to beat, and sometimes she stayed at Dummeridge and painted and talked to Cecily. Cecily admired her paintings a good deal and persuaded her into both watercolours and painting pictures of corners of the house. Alice painted a cobwebby window at a turn of the cellar stairs, and a scattering of hens on the old stone mounting block and a corner of the drawing room where a battered little alabaster bust stood on a table shrouded in an Indian shawl against a faded, striped wall covered in miniatures.

At lunchtime they ate eggs and salad and home-made brown bread by the Aga, and Cecily always gave Alice wine - at home there was beer and whisky for her father and sherry for her mother which of course she wouldn't touch for fear of feeling better, but never wine - and they talked as Alice had never talked before. Cecily even and it was thirty years since she had mentioned it to anyone - talked about Vienna. The story fired Alice with a yearning passion, not just the love story but the foreignness, and the powerful romance of the voice that blossomed and was then locked away in a box for ever when all the circumstances that had awakened it were wrenched away. Alice had never travelled, except on a school trip to Paris which was chiefly distinguished by interminable and sick-making hours shut up in a bus. The Jordans had all travelled; they took it as a matter of course. Richard travelled constantly, on business; the boys went skiing and both had been on safari in Kenya; Cecily went on her lecture tours and on her own to France and to Italy to look at things, she said, and to eat and drink both literally and metaphorically.

'You should go,' she said to Alice. 'It's criminal that you haven't been to Italy.'

Alice began to think that indeed it was. As the autumn wore on, she became privately very angry when Sunday night came and she had to leave Dummeridge, glimmering away in the firelight in its wealth of old stuffs and books. Lynford Road looked worse on each return, the scuffed carpet tiles in the hall, the uncompromising, harshly shaded ceiling lights, the black and green tiles in the bathroom, the mean proportions that confronted her everywhere, too high, too narrow. She began to long for Martin's Monday call, regular as clockwork, telling her when he was coming down to take her out. His arrivals, invariably punctual, became events of real excitement. Every time she found him standing on the tiled doorstep in Lynford Road, in a tweed jacket she had last seen him wear in the drawing room at Dummeridge and the brogues she could still hear striking the stone flags of the kitchen passage, her feeling of being rescued grew greater and more glamorous.

In the first week of December he arrived to take her out to supper in Marlow. He was wearing a suit and Alice, convinced he would say something to her, put on the black dress she had made from a length of jersey from the market, piled her hair high on her head and added some enormous copper earrings a friend at art school had made for an Egyptian exhibition. The restaurant in Marlow had pink napkins and red-shaded lights. Martin made a face.

'Sorry,' he said to Alice.

She wasn't entirely sure why he was apologizing; it looked to her just as she would expect a restaurant to look. In any case, she was far too full of anticipation to care if the panelling was phoney or Mantovani was being played whisperingly over the loudspeaker system. Martin ordered everything competently, told her about his week - she hardly listened to him - and then said he had something to tell her and something to ask her. She forced herself to look at him quite, quite straight.

'Tell first,' she said.

'My mother has two commissions for you. Two friends of hers have seen the paintings you have done of Dummeridge, and they want you to paint in their houses. Ma said she has asked a hundred and fifty for you. Each.'

'Each!' Alice said, and went scarlet.

'Well?' He was smiling hugely.

Alice clutched herself.

'It's - it's wonderful. So's she. Heavens. money-'

There was a sudden small hard lump in her throat. She supposed it to be amazement and delight.

'I rang her last night. She really wanted to tell you herself at Christmas, but I made her let me. That's the other thing. The thing I wanted to ask you.'

Alice couldn't look straight this time; she didn't seem able to look anywhere. She looked down instead into her melon and parma ham and Martin said to her bent head, 'Would you come for Christmas? To Dummeridge?'

There was a pause. Oh, Martin thought, you cool, cool customer, don't keep me dangling, don't, don't. Say yes, say yes, say...

'Love to,' Alice said. Her voice was warm but not in the least eager. It betrayed nothing of what she was feeling, nothing of the sudden fury that had seized her, a fury against Martin. Ask me, she had screamed at him silently, ask me, ask me. And he had said, come for Christmas.