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with a cheek blusher and lipstick, but here she had neither.
    A few months ago she had written an article on the ways Victorian ladies cheated before cosmetics became respectable. Beetroot was one aid. It stained red, and if you applied it lightly and quickly it didn’t look too hectic. There was a jar of pickled beetroot in the kitchen cupboard and she wondered about trying that out for lipstick and if it would leave her smelling and tasting of vinegar, and burst into giggles, and Duncan, who was sorting out papers at his work table, asked, ‘What’s the joke?’
    ‘Er—do you like vinegar?’ He probably thought she was thinking about dinner, but he’d wonder why that should strike her as funny. ‘Just a taste,’ she added.
    ‘Sure.’ He waited for further explanation and getting none went on with his paper sorting. He had picked up the work she had strewn around last night, before she came down this morning. She should have done that. She wouldn’t have known what order to put it in, but she could have gathered it up from the floor and apologised again. She said, ‘I’m—sorry about that.’
    ‘What?’ This time he wasn’t quite on her wavelength. It took him a moment to realise she was speaking, another to understand what she was talking about. ‘Forget it,’ he said, and Pattie knew she must shut up now.
    She thought, thank God I didn’t get the chance to burn any papers, that I didn’t manage to lift the typewriter and smash it. She had done no real damage. She wondered how Duncan would have reacted if she had, because although he had been understanding he was not a tolerant man. If she had snarled up his work he might have hit her for real.
    Lucky for me, she thought, and although she was without her health-and-happiness charm she had never felt so lucky in her life. Of course she desperately wanted to find it, but when she opened the back door fresh snow had covered her footsteps and her diggings into the wood pile. She would find nothing out there today, especially as tiny flakes were still falling.
    She found herself smiling at them, and knew she would have been disappointed if there had been signs of a thaw. She no longer wanted to get away. Some time fairly soon, of course, but not until she knew Duncan Keld better. Not only well enough to write her article but well enough to be sure that he would phone her, keep in touch, stay in her life and want her to stay in his.
    He had told her to help herself to the clothes in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, so she went up again and did that. By then the water was warm on the stove. Pattie washed herself and her undies and draped bra, pants and tights over a line she rigged up from a ball of twine she found in a kitchen drawer.. There were old black nails in the great beam fronting the fireplace. She twisted the twine around them and hung out her washing.
    Then she cleaned her teeth, with toothpaste on her finger. They said it showed a man loved you if he let you use his toothbrush, but maybe she should settle for the comb, and she washed her hair in the melted snow that was soft as silk, and felt silken and sensuous as she knelt in front of the fire on a cushion combing her hair dry.
    When Duncan got up she twisted round and looked enquiringly at him. ‘Coffee,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll get it.’
    ‘Thanks.’ He saw the washing and his eyebrows shot up, then he eyed her in comic speculation, dressed in his shirt sitting there with her undies all out on the line.
    ‘I’m wearing a string vest and Y-fronts,’ she informed him gravely.
    ‘Kinky!’
    ‘Draughty.’
    ‘I’d better boil the kettle,’ he said. ‘We don’t want the wind whistling through your string vest.’
    ‘ Your string vest.’
    He laughed. ‘Well, I’m sure it looks better on you.’
    He brought two mugs of coffee from the kitchen and Pattie thought he might stay to drink his, but he handed hers over and went back to the table and his work. He was quite unconscious of