THEY HAD RELUCTANTLY concluded their second assignation beneath the beeches. Frankie was tingling all over from what they had done: she’d let him put his hand inside the bra! Clem had been positively beside himself. The fluttering low inside her had been almost unbearably delicious.

Clem, followed by Frankie leading Marron, was about to step out onto the bridleway when he heard voices, laughter, from the direction of the lane. He held his hand up, signaling halt, and peered through the trees. Oh, God. Cushie Luckett and a girl. Susan Parsons! Oh, double God. Behind him, Frankie was calming the fretful horse. She looked over her shoulder.

“What?”

“People I know. They’ll see us.”

She bit her lower lip. It was what she did when she was thinking.

“Okay,” she said. “You go back. I’ll wait until they’re gone.”

Crouching in the undergrowth, he heard her chut-chutting Marron onto the track. Then silence, apart from late and busy birdsong.

She reassured Marron and pretended to busy herself with the buckle of his girth strap. The couple drew level with her. The boy had fair hair and a smirk. The girl was plump and had put on a sullen face.

“Orright, then, Miss Mortimer?” the boy said.

It was a horrible surprise that he knew who she was. She tried not to show it.

“Yes, thanks. Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

His gaze slid down Frankie’s body, then back up again, unhurriedly.

“Nice ’orse,” he said, not looking at it.

‘Thank you.”

“I daresay you’d sooner be ridun aroun on him than workun in them ole strorbry fields an that.”

The plump girl pushed his arm.

“Leave orf, Cushie. Come on.”

He gave Frankie a sort of salute.

“Nice meetun yer, Miss Mortimer. Mind how you go.”

They walked away. The boy said something. The girl pushed him again and looked back, laughing.

Frankie leaned her head against Marron’s flank. After a while she said, “They’ve gone.”

Clem emerged from cover. Frankie made a gesture that included everything. The huge countryside her father owned. “You’d think,” she said, “that in a place like this a person could get a little privacy.”

She made the remark lightly, but it acknowledged the heavy thing, the need, that was like a third presence when they should have been alone. Privacy wasn’t the word, though. All young couples sought that and usually found it hard to come by. What Clem and Frankie needed, what was absolutely necessary, was secrecy. They knew that for them discovery would not be an embarrassment; it would be a calamity. During brief respites between kisses and caresses, they had whispered of it, giggling at the awfulness of the thought. Reducing peril to a thrilling riskiness. In truth, they were very afraid, particularly when they were apart.

What would her father do, Frankie wondered, when his rage (which she feared less than her mother’s frigid disdain) had subsided? Put her under permanent guard, maybe? Lock her up? No, he’d send her away — that’s what he’d do. To her ghastly grandparents in Quebec. She’d never see Clem again, that was for sure. She would almost certainly die of misery. She pictured it. Her deathbed in the gloomy old house in Montreal. The life draining from her wasted body. His murmured name on her dying breath.

Clem brooded homeward on his bike. Try as he might, he could not restrict his thoughts to her and what they had done, what she had let him do. His hands remembered it; his head was full of disaster. If his parents — let alone his gran, for God’s sake — found out that he’d been doing dirty things in the woods with any girl, there’d be hell to pay. His family had a fantastic capacity for disgust. But with Gerard Mortimer’s daughter? It would be like . . . He couldn’t think of an analogy. A bomb going off or something. The real horror, though, was what might happen if Mortimer found out. He’d come around to the house with a horsewhip or a shotgun. Or both. And he’d give his dad the sack. Definitely. And then . . . well, there was no “then” after that. Clem could not picture a life after that. He’d have to run away, though he had no idea what running away involved, where you might run away to. He imagined himself dying in a ditch, wearing rags, halfway to Moscow.

He gripped the handlebars more tightly and swung the bike left at Black Cat corner.

The sky was as pink as melon flesh. The shadow of the old air-raid siren fell across the road, and he passed through it. His family, sitting in the false moonlight of the television, would be silently asking themselves where he was.