I forced Alison to her feet and we stumbled back the way we had come. Along a ridge to the west another col and slope led down towards the black distant sea of trees. Eventually we saw contoured against the sky a tor-shaped hill I had noticed on the way up. The refuge was just the other side of it. Alison no longer seemed to care; I kept hold of her hand and dragged her along by main force. Bullying her, begging her, anything to keep her moving. Twenty minutes later the squat dark cube of the refuge appeared in its little combe.

I looked at my watch. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach the peak; and over three hours to get back.

I groped my way in and sat Alison on a bunk. Then I struck a match, found the lamp and tried to light it; but it had no wick and no oil. I turned to the stove. That, thank God, had dry wood. I ripped up all the paper I could find: a Penguin novel of Alison’s, the wrappings off the food we had bought; then lit it and prayed. There were backpuffs of papery, then resinous smoke, and the kindling caught. In a few minutes the hut grew full of flickering red light and sepia shadows, and even more welcome heat. I picked up a pail. Alison raised her head from her knees.

“I’m going to get some water now.”

“Okay.” She smiled wanly.

“I should get under some blankets.” She nodded.

But when I came back from the stream five minutes later she was gingerly feeding logs through the upper door of the stove; barefooted, on a red blanket she had spread over the floor between the bunks and the fire. On a lower bunk she had laid out what was to be our meal: bread, chocolate, sardines, paximadia, oranges; and she had even found an old saucepan.

“Kelly, I ordered you to bed.”

“I suddenly remembered I’m meant to be an air hostess. The life and soul of the crash.” She took the pail of water and began to wash the saucepan out. As she crouched, I could see the sore red spots on her heels. “Do you wish we hadn’t done it?”

“No.”

She looked back up at me. “Just no?”

“I’m delighted we did it.”

Satisfied, she went back to the saucepan, filled it with water, began to crumble the chocolate. I sat on the edge of the bunk and took my own shoes and socks off. I wanted to be natural, and I couldn’t; and she couldn’t. The heat, the tiny room, the two of us, in all that cold desolation.

“Sorry I went all womany. It’ll never happen again.”

There was a ghost of sarcasm in her voice, but I couldn’t see her face. She had begun to stir the chocolate over the stove.

“Don’t be silly.”

A squall of wind battered against the iron roof, and the door groaned half open.

She said, “Saved from the storm.”

I looked at her from the door, after I had propped it to with one of the skis. She was stirring the melting chocolate with a twig, standing sideways to avoid the heat, watching me. She pulled a flushed face, and swiveled her eyes round the dirty walls. “Romantic, isn’t it?”

“As long as they keep the wind out.” She smiled secretly at me and looked down at her saucepan. “Why do you smile?”

“Because it is romantic.”

I sat down on the bunk again. She pulled off her jumper and shook her hair free. I invoked the image of Lily; but somehow it was a situation that Lily could never have got into; so could not be very absent-present in. I tried to sound at ease.

“You look fine. In your element.”

“So I should. I spend most of my life slaving in a four-by-two galley.” She stood with one hand on her hips; a minute of silence; old domestic memories from Russell Square; watching her cook. “What was that Sartre play we saw?”

“Huis Clos.”

“This is Huis even closer.”

“Why?”

She kept her back turned. “Being tired always makes me feel sexy.” I breathed in. She said softly, “One more risk.”

“Just because the first tests are negative, it doesn’t mean

She flashed a look round, a shy smile. “All right. Only… if you… you know.”

I stared at her. “You’re sweet.”

“Not very good at saying it.”

“I’m so absolutely fucked up. In all ways.”

She lifted a blackbrown dob from the saucepan. “I think this delicious consommé a la reine is ready.”

She came and bent beside me with that peculiar downwards look and automatic smile of air hostesses.

“Something to drink before dinner, sir?”

She thrust the saucepan under my nose, mocking herself and my seriousness, and I grinned; but she didn’t grin back, she gave me one of her gentlest smiles. I took the saucepan. She went to the bunks at the far end of the little hut; began to unbutton her shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Undressing.”

I looked away. A few seconds later she was standing by me with one of the blankets wrapped sarong fashion around her; then quietly sat on another folded blanket, on the floor, a careful two feet away from me. As she turned to reach for the food behind her, the blanket fell apart over her legs. She readjusted it when she turned back; but somewhere in the recesses of my mind that little Priapus threw up his hands, and that other member of his body, and leered wildly.

We ate. The paximadia, rusks fried in olive oil, were as uninteresting as always, the hot chocolate watery and the sardines inappropriate, but we were too hungry to care. Finally we sat—I had slipped onto the floor as well—satiated, backs against the edge of the bunk, adding more smoke to that from the stove. We were both silent, both waiting. I felt like a boy with his first girl, at the moment when the thing has to stop, or to go on to the end. Frightened to make any move. Her bare shoulders were small, round, delicate. The end of the blanket she had tucked in under her armpit had become loose. I could see the top of her breasts.

The silence grew acutely embarrassing, at least to me; a sort of endurance test, to see which of us would have to break it first. Her hand lay on the blanket between us, for me to reach out and touch. I began to feel that she had exploited the whole situation, engineered everything to place me in this predicament: this silence in which it was only too clear that she was in command, not myself; only too clear that I wanted her—not Alison in particular, hut the girl she was, any girl who might have been beside me at that moment. In the end I threw my cigarette into the stove and lay back against the bunk and shut my eyes, as if I was very tired, as if sleep was all I wanted—as indeed, bar Alison, it was. Suddenly she moved. I opened my eyes. She was naked beside me, the blanket thrown back.

“Alison. No.” But she knelt and began to undress me.

“Poor little boy.”

She straddled my legs and unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it out. I shut my eyes and let her make me barechested.

“It’s so unfair.”

“You’re so brown.”

She ran her hands up the side of my body, my shoulders, my neck, my lips; playing with me, examining me, like a child with a new toy. She knelt and kissed the side of my neck and the ends of her breasts brushed my skin.

I said, “I’d never forgive myself if…”

“Don’t talk. Just lie still.”

She undressed me completely, then led my hands all over her body, to know it all again, soft skin, small curves, slimness, her always natural nakedness. Her hands. As she caressed me, I thought, it’s like being with a prostitute, hands as adept as a prostitute’s, nothing but a matter of pleasure… and I gave way to the pleasure she gave me. After a while she lay on top of me, her head on my chest. A long silence. The fire crackled, burnt our legs a little. I stroked her back, her hair, her small neck, surrendered to the nerve-ends in my flesh. I imagined lying in the same position with Lily, and I thought I knew it would be infinitely disturbing and infinitely more passionate; not familiar, not aching with fatigue, hot, a bit sweaty… some cheapened word like randy; but white-hot, mysterious, overwhelming passion.