"He's supposed to be the product of pretty awful parents. Marristone Grange is the balancing factor – a good environment."

"Is it?"

"Pretty average, I'd say… like everyone in it."

He smiled at her, but didn't come out with the obvious compliment.

She said, "If you want to eat – there's food."

"Later… Tell me about Hammond."

She wished he wouldn't place the onus of a personality analysis on her. "I don't know people any more than you know people. You saw Hammond today. You tell me about him."

He refused to have the question bounced back at him. "No – your version first. You've known him longer than I have."

She tried to be fair. "I don't know anything about his background, but he strikes me as the type who went to a school like Marristone Grange himself. He slipped into the mould quite easily. His wife didn't. That's why they split. He put the school before her. He's regretting it now, I think. At this moment I see him as lonely. He's made one or two passes at me – unsuccessfully."

"Then he's normal?"

She looked for an undertone of humour and didn't find it. "Oh, I see. Heterosexual as opposed to the other. Well – yes. Well – emphatically yes. In any case, that doesn't arise any more, does it? David wasn't molested."

"No. But the sketch still hasn't been explained. Durrant perturbs me. Hammond's indifference gets so much under my skin I could…" He caught her expression and stopped.

"He's not indifferent. He's shocked and worried. I don't expect you were easy with him – how could you be? He probably met you with all his defences up. Everyone wants to survive, Roy Hammond included."

"He'll survive." It was bitter.

"Yes -why shouldn't he? David died – and even you will survive that. You have to, it's the way of nature." She sensed that her defence of Hammond had angered him, but didn't care. Today he was more normal than he was yesterday. The rage in him had to burn itself out some time. He looked better physically. The cold, white look of grief was less evident. Yesterday she had literally nursed him through a crisis and then crashed him back into it again by producing the sketch.

"If the sketch were mine," she said, "I'd tear it up. It's a sick thing. It's not David as he was. It isn't even proof of anything. He wasn't sexually assaulted. You can't use it at the inquest. Get rid of it – as you got rid of all the others. That's what he'd want."

He was silent for two or three minutes. How the hell did she know what David wanted? Who the hell was she trying to protect?

She sensed his withdrawal and then slowly was aware that he questioned his own reaction and was trying to reach out to her again.

He said brusquely, "It's the last thing I have belonging to him."

"But not the last thing he'd want you to have. You have his essays – his books."

"It's a cry for help."

"Is that how you want to remember him? Crying for help? He laughed, too, you know. For most of the time things were good for him."

"For most of the time. And the rest of the time-? By Christ, you're not asking me to ignore the rest of the time – the last few days? I've got to find out why."

"Agonising over that sketch won't make the rinding out any easier. You may never find out. What are you going to do – carry that sketch around for the rest of your life saying, My twelve-year-old son drew this -?"

Anger burst in him like a deep subterranean explosion. "Who are you doing this for-Hammond – Brannigan? Which of them set you up?"

Her astonishment was obvious and then her anger rose as bitterly as his. "I'm not asking you on anyone's behalf. Keep the bloody thing. Sleep with it under your pillow. Go quietly mad over it. Set David up in some sort of lunatic shrine. I knew him as he was. I remember him as an ordinary nice kid. If I were his mother I'd say – okay, I've heard you, I'll do what I can. Point made – and now let's get rid of it." Her voice shook. "But then, don't take any notice of me. I'm not his mother. I'm the school matron who entices you here to persuade you to tear up your puny bit of evidence. Evidence of what – for God's sake? Look, Your Honour – Mr. Coroner or whatever you're called – this is proof beyond any doubt that David killed himself."

She paused to draw breath.

His own anger -was spent. He didn't know how to heal her hurt. He could feel her pain in his own throat as she struggled with the words. "I was protecting you."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Keep your sorrow. I'm tired of it." She was lashing out, saying anything, not meaning it.

"That I understand."

"Do you? Can you look outside yourself long enough to understand anything? We're the enemy, don't forget."

"Not you."

"Oh yes – a few minutes ago you'd lumped me with the rest of them. Hammond. Brannigan. The school. David's killers. What do you think we are – a mob of murderers?"

"Someone…"

"Oh yes, someone – perhaps. And then again – perhaps not. Don't you want to believe in an accident? It could have been, you know. He could have been careless, kids are -they fall. What's wrong with that explanation? Not dramatic enough? Someone has to pay – is that it? What sort of cash value do you put on David?"

She got up before he could answer and left the room. The hot tears of rage and hurt were spilling over and running into the corners of her mouth. Shame was no small part of her emotions, it had been an appalling thing to say. She went into the bedroom and sprawled face-down on the bed pressing her face into the pillow.

She didn't hear him following her. The way she was lying reminded him of David in the hold of the ship and he put his hand on her shoulder to break the image. And then the image was gone and he saw and felt only her. Until now he had believed his sexual drive dead or anaesthetised. The explosion of anger had been like the bursting apart of a carapace. The protective conventions had gone. He had come to apologise anew, to try to make up for the hurt he had caused her. But now that was forgotten.

His hands tightened on her shoulders and he drew her to him.

She tried to push him from her. "I'm not a bloody whore!"

And then she stopped struggling – wanting it, too. Neither hatred nor love had any part of this.

There was no gentleness in their lovemaking, but there was gentleness afterwards as they lay together. He touched her breasts and then took his hands down in long caressing movements over her thighs.

She answered him, "Yes," meaning "Again."

She had slept with others before, but it had meant nothing. This time, in an aura of rage and pain, her initiation into a full awakening had been superb.

The second time, he took her slowly and tenderly and then leaned up on his elbow and looked down at her. With Ruth, and all the women before and after Ruth, the sexual preliminaries had been civilised. He had never forced himself on anyone before. He wondered if he would have drawn back if her resistance had lasted more than a moment or two. He should, he knew, be dismayed – not euphoric – and tried to frame some sort of an apology.

She put her fingers across his lips. "Don't."

"When I followed you in here I never intended…"

"I know."

He lay down beside her again and held her to him. Physically he felt eased- and pleasurably tired, David, truly dead, had passed into temporary oblivion. They lay for a long while in total contentment.

He didn't think about David again until he drove her back to the school later that evening. It had been a wholly satisfying and healing limbo of forgetfulness and he emerged from it reluctantly and with an irrational sense of betrayal. That he could forget David in an act of love with a girl he hardly knew showed a facet of his nature he hadn't been aware of. He backtracked in his mind everything that had led up to it and remembered the sketch.