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his new access to ‘loot’—by studying to become a lawyer.
    How times, indeed, could change.
    So even today, even on such a glorious morning, he would demonstrate his commitment to this plan with a spot of serious mugging up. It was unlike him, it was out of character, but hardly to be
objected to. Perhaps there being only two weeks left—so they might be chucklingly surmising in Henley—had brought out this sudden rush of conscientiousness in him.
    Except that he knew and she knew—did Miss Hobday know?—that he had about as much intention of becoming a lawyer as becoming a lettuce.
    ‘We’re mugging up, Jay.’ If anyone should ask.
    Though it still left one unanswered, and not even asked, question. She didn’t dare ask it, or want to ask it. It was for him to say.
    Assuming that he (they) would not be—mugging up—all day, what other separate arrangement might there be, might he have in place, with Miss Hobday?
    They lay side by side, uncovered, flicking ash, not talking, watching the smoke from their cigarettes rise up and merge under the ceiling. For a while such smoke-sharing was
enough. She thought of the white puffs from trains. Their cigarettes, now and then merely lodged vertically in their lips, were like miniature companion chimneys.
    There was only the bird-chatter outside and the strangely audible, breath-held silence of the empty house, and the faint ripple of air over their bodies, reminding them, though they eyed the
ceiling, that they were entirely naked. Two fish on a white plate, she thought. Two pink salmon on a sideboard, waiting for guests, guests at a wedding even, who would never arrive . . .
    She did not want to say, to ask, anything that might puncture the possibility of their staying like this for ever.
    It was called ‘relaxation’, she thought, a word that did not commonly enter a maid’s vocabulary. She had many words, by now, that did not enter a maid’s vocabulary. Even
the word ‘vocabulary’. She gathered them up like one of those nest-building birds outside. And was she even a maid any more, stretched here on his bed? And was he even a
‘master’? It was the magic, the perfect politics of nakedness.
    More than relaxation: peace.
    With one hand, the other holding her cigarette, she just brushed, not looking, his moist cock, feeling it stir almost instantly, like some sleeping nestling. As if she might have done such a
thing all her life, an idle duchess, stroking a puppy. Only moments ago, with the same hand twisted back to grasp one of the brass rods of the bedstead—this bed she’d never been in
before—she’d pressed with the other hand, palm flat but fingers digging, the small of his back, pressed hard the place where it seemed his cock joined his spine. She was commanding
him—what command could be stronger and more bidding? Yet he had commanded her: the front door.
    Now it seemed that what they’d just done was only a doorway itself to this supreme region of utter mutual nakedness.
    Peace. It was true of all days, it was the trite truth of any day, but it was truer today than on any day: there never was a day like this, nor ever would or could be again.
    Her cigarette was burning down. She moved the little ashtray—it was surely her prerogative—onto the strip of sheet between them. It was her belly, she might have
said, it wasn’t a table, she didn’t want him stubbing his cigarette out against it—much as she might actually have liked it. And how she would remember that ashtray coolly resting
on her belly.
    Then she wished she hadn’t been so fastidious or presumptuous, hadn’t done anything at all.
    He took the cigarette from his mouth and simply held it, upright, against his own belly.
    ‘I have to meet her at half past one. At the Swan Hotel at Bollingford.’
    He didn’t otherwise move, but it was like the breaking of a spell. And only anyway what she must have anticipated. Though she thought she might have passed, by magic