The Very White of Love: the heartbreaking love story that everyone is talking about!

‘What are you studying?’

‘Law and Modern Languages. Teddy Hall.’ He grins sheepishly. ‘A minor in partying.’

‘First year?’ Nancy smiles.

‘Second!’ Martin insists.

Nancy stares out of the window, with a dreamy expression on her face. ‘I used to live in Oxford.’

‘Where?’ Martin’s face lights up.

‘Cowley.’ She pulls a face. ‘Not exactly the dreaming spires.’ Pauses. ‘By the Morris factory, actually.’

‘That almost rhymes.’

‘What does?’

‘Factory. Actually.’

Nancy laughs. ‘It’s a very nice factory. Actually.’

They laugh together, eyes meeting, then withdrawing, touching again, withdrawing. Like shy molluscs.

‘Where in Knotty Green?’

‘Whichert House?’

‘That Arts and Crafts house? Opposite the Red Lion?’ Nancy’s voice is animated.

‘You know it?’

‘I cycle past it all the time. I love that house!’

‘It belongs to my uncle, Charles, and my aunt.’ He arches an eyebrow. ‘Dorothy Preston?’

‘That’s your aunt?’ Nancy reacts with surprise.

‘Yes. Do you know her?’

‘My mother does.’ Nancy pauses. ‘From church.’

‘Small world!’ Martin smiles at the coincidence. One more connecting thread linking them together.

Nancy lifts the teapot and refills their cups. Martin watches the golden liquid flow from the spout. Looks up into her eyes. Holds them. Like a magnet.

They meet at the same tearoom every day for the next week or go for long walks around Penn. They are creating a story together, a narrative of interconnected threads and confessions, and each meeting adds a new chapter to the story. In between their meetings, Martin mopes about like a lovesick spaniel. He can’t concentrate. The books he is meant to be reading for the new term are left unread. His face takes on a distant, faraway look, as though he’s been smoking opium. But he is under the influence of drug far more powerful than opium: a drug called love.

One day, they take the footpath towards Church Path Wood.

Conversation has progressed beyond the mere exchange of biographies. Today, they are on parents. His mother’s ill health and depression since the death of his father. Her mother’s asthma. His special affection for his sister, Roseen. And how his parents farmed them out to boarding school when they were living in Egypt.

‘That must have been so hard on you.’ She squeezes his hand.

‘Aunt D. was more like a mother than my real mother,’ he says as they stop at a kissing gate. Nancy steps inside, Martin leans against the wooden rail. ‘Sent me socks and marmalade. Posted my books when I forgot them. Spoiled me rotten in the hols.’

‘And your father?’

‘He was the black sheep of the family: “a bounder”, I suppose you’d say.’

‘Why?’ Nancy’s eyes widen.

‘Not sure.’ Martin chews on a grass stalk. ‘Gambling? Drink? Whatever it was, he was barred from joining the family law firm.’

‘Which is why he ended up in Egypt?’

‘That’s it. High court judge. President of the Jockey Club.’ Martin pauses. ‘My father basically preferred his racehorses to his children.’ He pulls an ironic grin, which can’t quite disguise the residual hurt.

One of the few things Martin’s father did teach him, ironically, was to hate snobbery. Colonial life in Egypt was driven by it: that insidious, British snobbery that judges people by where they grew up and the school they went to. One of the reasons Martin is so fond of Nancy is that she judges people for what they are, not their social rank.

She points across the field: a shimmering band of colour stretches across the eastern sky.

‘A rainbow!’ Martin says. ‘It must be a sign.’

She turns, and he’s there. Her lips and his. Sudden and electric. Their first kiss. The kind you get lost in. Like exploring a labyrinth in a blindfold. A labyrinth of feeling and touch and passion.

So that’s the story, Aunt D. I can’t wait for you to meet her. All’s well here. I just got back from taking Mother down to her new nursing home, in Wiltshire. She is still walking rather poorly after the fall, though when I hid her stick for a few minutes she found she could walk surprisingly well without it. The nursing home is really pleasant. Views of the Quantocks, a fire burning in the grate. A large, cheery lady named Mrs Dodds runs it.

How is Scotland? I hope you won’t get fly-fishing elbow again, even though you must keep up your fame as a fisherwoman.

Yours, Martin.

He lights a cigarette and sits staring out of the window into the garden. A soft, autumn rain is falling. Scamp lies sleeping by the fire. It’s only sixteen days since they met. But it feels like a lifetime. His world has been split in two, like a tree struck by lightning. There is before NC and after NC. Everything he sees, everything he tastes or touches or hears, he wants to share with her. When she is not there, his world feels bleak and empty.

Sixteen days. And everything has changed.

14 OCTOBER 1938 (#ulink_81c63788-b0c6-52c5-94bc-5bc8d6e51548)

Oxford (#ulink_81c63788-b0c6-52c5-94bc-5bc8d6e51548)

‘Forties, Cromarty, Forth.’ The shipping forecast crackles on the wireless. ‘Easterly or northeasterly 5 to 7, decreasing 4 at times . . . ’

Martin has fled his room at Teddy Hall to escape the drunken heartbreak of one of his friends, a hapless English student called James Montcrieff, who has broken up with his girlfriend. Martin offered him the sofa for a few nights. He’s been there two weeks. Drunk most of the time. So Martin has decamped to his friend Jon Fraser’s flat, in Wellington Square. Jon is a gangly second year student with a shock of red hair. Outside in the square, the last autumn leaves on the chestnut trees shine in the gaslight. Coals glow in the grate.

‘Could you turn that down, old man?’ Jon’s voice calls from the other side of the room. ‘I have to get this bloody essay finished by tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Sorry, Jon!’ Martin gets up and switches off the wireless. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Slowly.’ His friend leans back from his desk and stretches. ‘Have you ever read Valmouth?’