His hard, yellow eyes gleamed through his spectacles. He was smiling, but she wasn’t sure if he was fooling or not. He always made her feel faintly sexy, but uneasy at the same time.

‘Now,’ he had said briskly, ‘for next week, write an essay on which of Shakespeare’s characters would be best in bed and why.’

Harriet flushed scarlet.

‘But I can’t. .’ she began, then bit her lip.

‘Can’t write from experience? Use your imagination then. Shakespeare didn’t know what it was like to be a black general or a Danish prince, did he?’

‘Hamlet wouldn’t have been much good,’ said Harriet. ‘He’d have talked too much, and never made up his mind to, until it was too late and one had gone off the boil.’

Theo had given a bark of laughter.

‘That’s more like it. Write something I might enjoy reading.’

Well, there was her essay, and it had taken her all week. She had read nothing but Shakespeare, and thought about nothing but sex. And she felt light-headed from exhaustion, a sense of achievement and the snow outside.

She was also starving. No-one was up. The landlady and her husband liked to lie in on Saturday. Downstairs among the letters scattered on the floor lay one from her boyfriend, Geoffrey. Reading it, she wandered into the kitchen, her jeans, too long when she wasn’t wearing heels, swishing on the linoleum.

‘Dear Harriet,’ wrote Geoffrey, on office writing paper, ‘I am really fed up. I can’t get down this weekend, but I must finish this report and hand it in to the MD on Monday.’

Then followed a lot of waffle about pressure of work, grabbing every opportunity in the present economic climate, and doing it for both their sakes.

‘So pleased you have finally gone on the pill,’ he ended up. (Harriet had a vision of herself poised like a ballerina on a tiny capsule.) ‘I’m so fed up with being parked outside your bedroom every night like flowers in a hospital. I want you so much darling, I know I can make you happy. I’ll be down next weekend, early Friday night. Meanwhile keep yourself on ice. Hugs and kisses and other things, love Geoffrey.’