‘I’d finished school and I was going up to Oxford to read modern languages. I hadn’t spent Christmas at Ashton that year. A group of us went to Gstaad to ski. It was great fun and I was rather good at it.’ ‘I bet you were,’ David said. He’d woken and found that she’d got up early and gone out walking in the grounds before breakfast. It made him uneasy. Already she had slipped away from him, engrossed in the family and the past. They hadn’t made love that night. His plans for a celebration dinner as the lead-up to asking her to marry him had gone awry. He couldn’t reach her, and they had drifted to sleep lying close but very much apart. She had come back from the walk looking too bright and didn’t respond when he kissed her. They went down to breakfast in the splendid green and gold dining room, and it was peopled for him with the ghosts of Nancy’s past. He felt ill at ease and unhappy. He wasn’t used to such feelings. He reached out and held her hand under the table.
