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Of course it wasn’t just the house, she realised as she ate her own cheese and biscuits in her usual seat by the fire. It was the man. She wouldn’t want to be here without Duncan, even if it was the middle of summer or winter, and if they became really good friends he might ask her here again.

She would invite him to her apartment when they were both in London, but suddenly that place, so neat and tidy and lacking any real character, seemed like the home of a stranger. When I get back, she decided, there’ll be some changes made. It was a pity her apartment didn’t have a fireplace, watching logs burn was wonderfully relaxing.

She relaxed during the afternoon, playing patience with a pack of cards she found in the sideboard drawer, and then prepared the meal and then ‘dressed’ for dinner. Dressing meant getting out of her sweater and skirt and into the shirt again, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow and enough buttons left undone to reveal a reasonable cleavage. She felt comfortable and she hoped she looked sexy, and as she hovered over the boiling spaghetti she decided she was getting enough pink in her cheeks to dispense with the beetroot.

It was a lark, cooking like this. She never closed the kitchen door, that way some of the heat from the fire came through and with that and the stove the kitchen was almost cosy. But her real reason was that she could turn from the stove and see straight down the living room to where Duncan was sitting at his work table, and each time she looked it gave her a feeling of security, of everything being all right.

He had lit lamps when the light started to fail, and tonight as well as the one on the table he lit the Davey lamp and she carried that into the kitchen. That was around five o’clock, he was still working at a few minutes to seven, and Pattie was debating with herself how to call him to dinner, without making the break in his concentration too shattering, when the matter was settled for her. She was warming plates on the top of the stove, and she picked up one that had been a little too close to the jet, gave a piercing shriek and dropped it on to the flagstones, where it exploded into smithereens with enough noise for a whole tea-set. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Duncan roared.

‘What’s it sound as though I’m doing?’ she yelled back. ‘Dropping a red-hot plate. Sorry about all that. I suppose I should have hung on?’ She came out of the kitchen, sucking her fingertips and glaring. ‘It’s five to seven,’ she told him. ‘Do you want dinner put back?’

‘Do we still have a dinner? What was on the plate?’

‘Nothing.’ If there had been she
would
have been fed up. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ she said. ‘And it’s lucky you’ve got another plate, although I’d better not make a habit of it in case they don’t get us out for a day or two.’

Saying that made her feel so much better that she started to smile, and Duncan got up and came towards her, telling her, ‘There’ll be a snowplough along as soon as it’s possible. My neighbours from the farm.’ The farm that was a good four miles away. ‘You said your family and friends didn’t know you were setting off for here, but will they be worried about you?’

‘Not for a few days.’ Pattie walked back into the kitchen and he followed her and swept up the pieces of plate while she pottered over the stove.

She explained, ‘My family’s my mother and she lives in California. I’m on holiday from the office and my boy-friend won’t panic for about a week.’

‘Do you often clear off without leaving him a forwarding address?’ He was curious, and it did sound a woolly sort of relationship.

‘We don’t live in each other’s pockets.’ She turned off the gas under the spaghetti and added, ‘We don’t live together.’

‘I see.’ Do you? she wondered. Well, it’s not so clear to me as it used to be. Michael had said he loved her, she had said she loved him, but now she was beginning to doubt if they had ever been together in any way that was deep or meaningful.

She thought of her car as she had last seen it, almost buried in the snow. What with further falls and drifts there wouldn’t be much at all to see now, only the very top of the tilted roof perhaps, and she shivered and quipped, ‘Somebody’s walking over my grave,’ and thought that if the car had been her grave in a few months she would have been almost forgotten. Even Michael would soon forget her.

‘Let me see your fingers.’ Duncan took her hand and her fingers curled instinctively, so did her toes, but he couldn’t see them, and she quickly straightened her fingers and he examined the tips and she said, ‘It’s nothing. Really.’

He agreed, ‘You let go in time.’

‘A question of timing,’ she babbled. ‘If you let go in time you’re all right.’

But he didn’t let go of her at once. He went on holding her hand, looking into her face as though he planned on doing a sketch from memory, and she was staring back at him. He had lines from nose to mouth, two more cutting between his brows. Under the brows his eyes were pitch dark and she could see her tiny reflection in them. She said huskily, ‘You’ve a lot of wrinkles for your age.’

‘No, I haven’t,' he said cheerfully. ‘These are thought lines, a sign of intelligence. How old’s your boy-friend?’

‘Thirty. You’re only twenty-nine, aren’t you? Only you look older than Michael.’ She was being tactless but while he held her hand she didn’t seem able to stop talking, not even long enough to consider what she was saying.

‘No wrinkles on Michael?’ enquired Duncan.

‘Not really, no.’

‘A smooth character?’

Smooth, yes, shallow maybe. She said, ‘I don’t know what you mean by smooth. He’s very elegant, very bright too. He’s an accountant.’

‘A bright accountant should come in handy.’ Of course he wasn’t impressed, he was smarter than Michael would ever be. He grinned, ‘And what would he do if he knew you were stuck out here with me?’

She didn’t think Michael would find it funny. When she faced the question/like that, she thought he might be annoyed at her getting herself into this predicament and if he wasn’t his mother would have something to say about it. Michael’s parents were
very
respectable.

She shrugged, ‘It isn’t my fault.’ She didn’t care what anybody thought, she didn’t feel the least bit guilty. ‘And if he did know what could he do, if even a snowplough can’t get through?’

‘Mmm.’ Duncan seemed to be considering and she said drily, ‘What would you do? Drop in by helicopter or swoop down on skis?’

‘One or the other.’ She believed him, and she felt a stab of jealousy, so she made herself smile and heard herself ask, ‘Who is she?’

‘Who?’

‘The girl you’d pluck out of here?’

‘Am I being interviewed?’

‘No,' she said, but he probably thought she would use it and he wasn’t telling her that kind of thing, because he shook his head at her smiling, and she was glad. She didn’t want a name. She didn’t want to hear about the girl he would come rushing to rescue. ‘It’s cooked,’ she said, looking at the spaghetti pan.

While Duncan washed his hands she tucked her hair behind her ears, holding the little mirror at arm’s length. The soft water wash had left it shiny but floppy. ‘You wouldn’t have a hairgrip about the place, would you?’ she asked plaintively.

‘Never use ’em.’

‘I thought somebody might have left one.’

‘Not with me.’

Pattie sighed at herself in the mirror with her hair falling over her eyes. ‘Oh dear! What shall I do with it?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ It was baby-fine. It needed blow-dry lotions and a mist of lacquer if it was going to hold any style at all.

‘Lacks body,’ she said, and he burst out laughing.

‘I wouldn’t say that.’ He leered at her appreciatively in her tight-belted shirt, and she laughed, demanding, ‘How would you know?' Then she remembered that she had slept beside him last night and blushed while she was laughing, and shook her head to hide it so that her hair covered her face like a veil.

‘Let’s see,’ he said, and Pattie felt his fingers in her hair with the same shock of sensation as though he had lain them on her breasts. But this was fooling, not a caress. He twisted it gently into some sort of topknot and still holding it, reached to open a drawer and produced a wooden skewer. 'I'm sure I’ve seen this style somewhere,’ he said.

‘Portrait of a Victorian skivvy?’ she joked, but her mouth was so dry it was a wonder she could speak.

He skewered the bun neatly enough, but the moment he let go the hair slithered down again and the skewer fell out. ‘Any more good ideas?’ she said.

‘We are talking about your hair?’

‘What else?’ She could laugh at him, flirting and fooling, but inside she melted with longing.

‘What we need,’ he said, ‘is a ribbon.’

What she needed was him and they were here all alone, but nobody was going to come through that door through all that lovely snow, so there was time for everything. ‘I’d give a lot for a hair ribbon,’ she said. ‘Did the girl who didn’t leave a hairpin leave a ribbon?’

She was hardly jealous at all now. Whoever the girl was she wasn’t here, and from the way Duncan was looking at Pattie he wasn’t missing her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually I was thinking of a tie. I do have a tie. I’ll get it for you.’

It was grey silk, had a couture label, and looked quite new. ‘Did you buy yourself this?’ she asked, and he said, surprised, ‘No, I didn’t, it was a present. Why?’

Because women bought ties for men. Pattie wrinkled her nose at it. ‘Oh, it doesn’t look what I’d expect you to wear. Too wishy-washy.’ In fact it was a beautiful tie, but she had taken a dislike to it.

‘Do you want it or don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Yes, please.’ Of course she’d have it, she didn’t want him wearing it. She asked, ‘Do many people buy you ties?’

‘No.’ He sat on the edge of the kitchen table, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded, eyeing her.

‘Do you wear ties?’

‘Funny question,’ he said. ‘Sure I wear ties, and if this is for that article of yours who the hell cares?’

‘It isn’t, I’d forgotten I was supposed to be interviewing you, only somehow I can’t imagine you sort of spruced up.’ The only time she had seen him, before he came here, was when he came looking for her after Willie got his black eye. It had been a wet day, Duncan had been wearing a trenchcoat mac, dark hair blown and unkempt. In the photographs in his file he had looked casually clad, but now he said, ‘Don’t bother to imagine it. But I do sort of spruce up when the occasion demands. That tie, for instance, I’d wear that on television.’

He did regular programmes that Pattie had always contrived to miss, and she admitted, ‘I’ve never watched you on telly.’

‘That’s all right, I’ve never watched you.’

‘I’ve never been on.’

‘That accounts for it.’ He was laughing at her, but he couldn’t know she had resented somebody else buying him a tie and wanted him to say he had no use for it. That really was ridiculous and she smiled. ‘But from now on,’ she said, ‘I promise to watch.’

‘And I promise to watch you.’

‘Suppose I never get on the box?’

‘Who’s talking about the box?’

She would like that, if he meant it. She would like
him staying close enough to watch her when they got out of here. She fastened the tie bandeau fashion around her head, knotting it under her hair at the back and not caring how she creased it. If he wanted a grey tie she would buy him one to replace this, then he would remember her when he put it on and not what’s-her-name.

‘How’s that?’ She stood still for inspection.

‘Very neat,’ he said, and stroked her head with both hands, lightly smoothing down the fly-away hairs. It would have been so easy for him to tilt her face and take her lips, and she would have kissed him back with more passion than she had ever shown before. The longing was so fierce in her that her hands seemed to move of their own accord, clasping behind his neck, but still Duncan didn’t kiss her, and she couldn’t make the next move and kiss him first. Instead her fingers crept up into his hair and she said brightly, ‘Yours doesn’t slip away. Yours springs back
—
very strong. I could get a good grip on your hair.’

‘One of my best features,’ he said. ‘Hair to hang on to. You have a beautiful nose.’

‘I have?’ Her nose was probably one of her best features, straight and nicely chiselled. Michael’s was larger but much the same pattern, and he was proud of his profile, she had seen him surreptitiously admiring it in restaurant mirrors.

‘Beautiful,’ said Duncan. He bent his head and the touch of his lips on hers paralysed her, so that her breath caught and she couldn’t move. She would have done. As the kiss became more urgent she would have caught fire, but it didn’t. Duncan raised his head again and said, ‘Something’s burning,’ and the sauce was giving out pungent fumes, which made Pattie howl and rush to get the pan off the gas.

‘Just spaghetti, is it?’ Duncan enquired.

‘
No
, oh
no
. . .’ She thought it was, though. She could have wept with frustration, because who wanted just spaghetti when she had planned dinner by candlelight? But as the bubbling stopped and she dipped a spoon into the thick meat and tomato there still seemed to be a good layer on top that hadn’t caught. ‘How do you feel about crispy sauce?’ she asked.

‘I’ll try anything.’

‘I’ll remember that.’ She smiled at him over her shoulder. ‘Well, such as it is, it’s ready, so please could we lay the table?’

‘Which table?’

There was a scrubbed-top table in here, but she wanted the one he was working at. She said, ‘I know your papers and things are on it, but I’d put them all back in the same places.’

‘I’d rather you kept your hands off,’ and she bit her lip at that and said stiffly,

‘Sorry about last night, but I’m not going to start flinging typewriters around again.’

‘This isn’t personal.’ He smiled at her. ‘I shouldn’t think you’re a girl who repeats herself, but if we’ve got to have that table clear I’ll clear it.’ He collected knives and forks from a cutlery drawer while Pattie drained and dished up the spaghetti and scooped on what was left of the sauce. The table was clear when she carried in the plates, and she said, ‘I thought candles would be nice, then we won’t see the black bits.’