She wasn't always despondent. She didn't spend all her mornings on the floor, curled around those blinding squares of sunlight. Her moods went through stages, but they were definitely improved by Manda, who had started taking her out for coffee at the Grand Cafe, or for morning strolls in Christchurch Meadow.

Jack often accompanied them on these outings, but he couldn't see what was so mood-enhancing about them. As far as he could tell, they just consisted of Manda reproaching Ellini for her gloomy attitude, although sometimes the two of them would branch out to complaining about men, and Jack would smile rather smugly, because he knew he was an example of everything they were complaining about, and he knew they both adored him.

And then the doll helped her—although the story of the doll was still troubling to him. It didn't cause him pain exactly, because nothing did, but it gave him a moment's agitation every time the memory passed through his mind. It felt like a slippery fish that he was supposed to be grabbing hold of.

They had been discussing—as they so often did these days—how odd it was that he wasn't attracted to her, although it was always Jack who complained about this, and Ellini who tried to make him feel better, which seemed like the wrong way round.

"I bet this happens all the time with women, doesn't it?" he said, drumming his fingers on the table in the Faculty Lounge. "You meet a man, and he's just perfect. He makes you laugh, he understands you, and he doesn't annoy you—not even in that tiny, inevitable way that best friends can annoy each other. But you're not attracted to him, and so you're torn."

"And that can never happen to a man?"

"Oh, almost all of it can happen to a man," Jack conceded. "But the ending's different. We meet women who are perfect for us but who we aren't attracted to, and we're not torn. We just go home with the idiotic blonde we are attracted to. It doesn't even occur to us that there was a choice."

Ellini laughed faintly. She was standing by the table, touching the varnish with the tips of her gloved hands, as though she couldn't decide whether to stay or go.

"Of course," he went on, "When the love wears off, I suppose some men stay with women they're not attracted to, instead of going out and getting themselves a mistress, because they're old and tired, and it's easier than starting again." He broke off, because Ellini was laughing again. "I'm just hypothesizing, you understand. I've never been there myself, but that seems to be the way it happens. However, I can't do it. I may get old, but I never get tired. That's my curse."

"It's a pretty good one, as curses go."

Jack sighed. "Please don't implore me to have perspective when I'm complaining, mouse. It puts me off."

She giggled and lapsed into silence, staring at him with mischievous eyes that put him off even more.

"Where was I? Oh, yes. The annoying thing is, there's nothing wrong with you." He grabbed her waist and lifted her onto the table, so that her face was level with his. Then he lifted her chin and examined her critically. It didn't help that she was giggling the whole time. "Nice hair, good teeth, no spots, reasonable-sized breasts..."

"Oh, reasonable-sized, are they, now?"

"You've improved on me," said Jack sniffily. "But not enough."

"Don't worry," she said, with a kind of wide-eyed, childish simplicity. "I'm going to be gone soon anyway."

Jack rolled his eyes but didn't rise to the temptation of reprimanding her.

"It's all right," she insisted. "I don't mind."

"Of course you don't mind! You're not right in the head!" He gave her a sulky prod to the shoulder. "It's another one of the things I like about you."

"But there's a prophecy..."

"Bugger the prophecy," said Jack. "Stay with me."

Ellini hesitated, and then gave him a hard, cool look. "For the five minutes a day when you're not drooling over Alice Darwin?"

"Are there five minutes a day when I'm not—?"

"Well, exactly," she interrupted. "No thank you."

This seemed—for Ellini—like a confrontational thing to say, and yet, to his surprise, a few seconds later, she gave a little hiccough of laughter.

Jack looked down, to find that his wandering left hand had curled unconsciously around her wrist. Ellini was looking at it too, and trying absent-mindedly to pull herself free. But, without any instructions from Jack, the hand was clinging on. And it was making her giggle, as though she was suddenly ticklish.

Jack frowned. She usually avoided his hands so carefully, as though she was a child playing a complicated and absorbing little game: stepping back when he came forward, measuring out her steps so there was always something—a table, a chair, or another person—filling the space between them.

And he had always supposed that this was because she was still in love with him—that his touch would have made her go to pieces and fall, weeping, at his feet, protesting that she couldn't do this anymore. It was irritating to discover that she had apparently been avoiding his touch because his touch gave her an incurable fit of the giggles.

"Does this happen with all men?" he asked. His matter-of-fact expression was making her laugh even more.

Ellini shook her head, unable to speak.

"Just me?"

She nodded.

A slow smile spread across Jack's face. He couldn't stay annoyed for long, because making her lose control was his favourite game, and he had never seen her as out of control as this.

"D'you mind if I try something?" He didn't wait for her to answer before releasing her wrist and resting the tips of his fingers against her arm. She was still breathless, her eyes still watering, but the giggles didn't start up again. "So it doesn't work with just the tips of the fingers? It has to be the whole hand?"

"I don't know!" she protested. "I haven't been making a study of this!"

"I think perhaps we should. But we should be scientific. We are in an Oxford Faculty, after all. Certain standards have to be maintained."

He turned to a desk beside the window and hunted through its drawers, searching for the supposedly secure place where Danvers kept his pocket-watch, while Ellini caught her breath and endeavoured to protest.

"We'll increase the degree of contact systematically," he said, over his shoulder, "measuring how long the symptoms endure and how long they take to subside."

He found the watch in the bottom-most drawer, and brought it over to Ellini, noticing with pleasure that her smile got broader the more serious he became. "Are you ready?" he asked, his eyes on the watch-face. But Ellini was already giggling.

"I don't think we're going to get very accurate readings if you're laughing to begin with, mouse."

"I can't help it! How am I supposed to be serious with you looking like that?"

Jack's forehead wrinkled. "I don't understand. I'm being as unfunny as I can possibly be. What could be less funny than a serious man checking his watch?"

"Um, everything?"

"Try to concentrate, little mouse. We're doing this for science, after all. Now, are you ready?"

She shook her head rapidly, but Jack pretended he hadn't seen this. He put the flat of his hand down on her wrist and looked at it expectantly. Ellini folded up with laughter.

He took his hand away and focused on the watch. It was a full fifteen seconds before the giggles died down. "This looks very serious," he said solemnly. "I think we'd better see what happens if I try a two-handed approach."

"No!" Ellini shrieked, trying to jump off the table. But he pushed her lightly back down again and positioned both his hands on her ribcage. Underneath his fingertips, he could feel her stomach muscles seizing up with laughter. And at the same time, that strange beating behind his eyes, like a moth trying to escape his cranium.

And suddenly, without the intervention of his brain, his left hand was reaching out and pulling her forward into a kiss.

She turned her head at the last minute, so that his lips came to rest against her cheek, and all at once, she wasn't laughing anymore. She brought her hand up, tucked an errant lock of hair behind her ear, and slid off the table.

It was all the worse because the laughter still haunted her face. He could still see the crinkles it had caused around her mouth. He could still see the tears standing in her eyes.

And then it was worse than anything because Alice's voice was behind him, straightening his spine, cutting through the fuzzy shreds of happiness like a knife.

"If the two of you have quite finished behaving like children," she said, with her usual stern sweetness. "I have a present for you, Miss Syal."

She was standing in the doorway, holding up a velvet draw-string bag with malicious satisfaction, as though she was showing Ellini the axe which would one day chop her head off. She sauntered forwards and upended the contents onto the tabletop.

Out tumbled dozens of broken pieces of clay—slightly concave, like bits of eggshell, as though they had once made up a solid, three-dimensional shape. The broken pieces had traces of paint on one side. Jack could make out flesh tones, and faded yellows, and even a kind of ochre which might once have been a vivid red.

"The pieces of this clay doll have been in my family for generations," Alice explained. "My grandfather swears all the pieces are there. When she was broken, he went around the house with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass, gathering up every shard of her. But no one has yet had the patience to reassemble it." She gave Ellini a brief smile. "I thought you might like to have a try, since you seem to be at something of a loose end these days."

"Y's, m'm," said Ellini, too mortified to even pronounce her vowels.

Alice turned to Jack, and beckoned with those long, thin, fascinating fingers, encased in their black lace gloves. "I'd like a word with you, Jack. Now."

Jack wouldn't have been able to disobey if he'd wanted to—but he didn't want to, that was the worst part. He wanted to follow her, tie a gag around her mouth, and search through the folds of her elaborate black dress for whatever it was that made her so unbearably attractive.

He saw Alice, with her poised, pretty face and her mouth-watering curves and thought: That's real. With her, I know who I am and what I want, even if I'm not particularly proud of either of them.

***

The doll had been given to her out of spite—something to keep her occupied while Alice got on with the serious business of teasing Jack—but Ellini laboured on it as if it was her magnum opus. She even talked to it. Through the open door of the Faculty Lounge, Jack would hear adorable monologues like:

"I didn't like you at first. I thought you were dirty and damaged, but you've a right to exist, just like everyone else, haven't you? You know? People don't have to look at you if they find you offensive. They can always look somewhere else. The world's full of different things to look at."

Or again, when she had successfully glued together two pieces of the doll's face, and evidently forgotten that Jack was still in the room. "What a charming scar that's going to be! Everybody's going to ask you about it. You know, you won't be very pretty when all this is over, but at least you'll have some interesting stories to tell."

There was nothing Jack liked better than to hear her telling stories and talking nonsense to that doll. He'd hated it at first, because the more she looked at the doll, the less she looked at him, but in the end, curiosity had overcome his irritation. He had even joined in with the assembly process.

In fact, everybody had. Sergei and Danvers too. They'd be asking her something completely unrelated—maybe it would be a polite enquiry about how she'd slept, which was a courtesy they insisted on maintaining, even though they knew perfectly well she spent her nights scurrying over the rooftops—and they'd suddenly break off and say: "Excuse me, Miss Syal, but doesn't that piece go at the back? No, just behind the ear, there?"

Even the housemaid, Sarah, would find little bits of clay on the floor while she was sweeping, and leave them out on the sideboard for 'poor Miss Syal', just in case they were pieces of her 'broken dolly'.

Sergei would talk happily about the kind of adhesives and coagulants that could be used to fill in the gaps in the broken china. Danvers would suggest craftsmen he knew in the town who could be employed to re-paint her face.

Even Alice would watch the construction with burning eyes, as though she was longing to snatch the pieces out of Ellini's hands and show her exactly where she was going wrong.

And one morning, when they'd all been sitting in the Faculty Lounge, squabbling over their coffee about the positioning of a particular piece, Jack had caught himself thinking—with absolute certainty, but no idea how he'd arrived at the conclusion: This is happiness. It's not at all how I expected it to be.

Then he caught sight of Alice, prowling round the outer edges of the room, and thought, almost plaintively: I wish it was just this. I wish I didn't feel desire or notice pretty women. I wish it was all just friendship and coffee and stupid jokes. It's enough for them, he added, looking at the gently squabbling Sergei and Danvers.

And then, for the fiftieth time that morning—in fact, he caught himself doing this almost as often as he caught himself lighting up a cigarette—he had wondered what was wrong with him.