I leant over and ran my finger around the inside of it; a nylon tag had been left inside. I pulled at it, hoping to snap it, but it proved stubbornly resistant.

‘New shirt. Is it really troubling you?’

‘No. I just thought I’d bring it up for fun.’

‘Do we have any scissors in the bag?’

‘I don’t know, Clark. Believe it or not, I rarely pack it myself.’

There were no scissors. I glanced behind me, where the audience were still settling themselves into their seats, murmuring and scanning their programmes. If Will couldn’t relax and focus on the music, the outing would be wasted. I couldn’t afford a second disaster.

‘Don’t move,’ I said.

‘Why –’

Before he could finish, I leant across, gently peeled his collar from the side of his neck, placed my mouth against it and took the offending tag between my front teeth. It took me a few seconds to bite through it, and I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the scent of clean male, the feel of his skin against mine, the incongruity of what I was doing. And then, finally, I felt it give. I pulled back my head and opened my eyes, triumphant, with the freed tag between my front teeth.

‘Got it!’ I said, pulling the tag from my teeth and flicking it across the seats.

Will stared at me.

‘What?’

I swivelled in my chair to catch those audience members who suddenly seemed to find their programmes absolutely fascinating. Then I turned back to Will.

‘Oh, come on, it’s not as if they’ve never seen a girl nibbling a bloke’s collar before.’

I seemed to have briefly silenced him. Will blinked a couple of times, made as if to shake his head. I noticed with amusement that his neck had coloured a deep red.

I straightened my skirt. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I think we should both just be grateful that it wasn’t in your trousers.’

And then, before he could respond, the orchestra walked out in their dinner jackets and cocktail dresses and the audience hushed. I felt a little flutter of excitement despite myself. I placed my hands together on my lap, sat up in my seat. They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound – the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat.

Will looked sideways at me, his face still carrying the mirth of the last few moments. Okay, his expression said. We’re going to enjoy this.

The conductor stepped up, tapped twice on the rostrum, and a great hush descended. I felt the stillness, the auditorium alive, expectant. Then he brought down his baton and suddenly everything was pure sound. I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen. Will hadn’t described any of it like this. I had thought I might be bored. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

And it made my imagination do unexpected things; as I sat there, I found myself thinking of things I hadn’t thought of for years, old emotions washing over me, new thoughts and ideas being pulled from me as if my perception itself were being stretched out of shape. It was almost too much, but I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit there forever. I stole a look at Will. He was rapt, suddenly unselfconscious. I turned away, unexpectedly afraid to look at him. I was afraid of what he might be feeling, the depth of his loss, the extent of his fears. Will Traynor’s life had been so far beyond the experiences of mine. Who was I to tell him how he should want to live it?

Will’s friend left a note asking us to go backstage and see him afterwards, but Will didn’t want to. I urged him once, but I could see from the set of his jaw that he would not be budged. I couldn’t blame him. I remembered how his former workmates had looked at him that day – that mixture of pity, revulsion and, somewhere, deep relief that they themselves had somehow escaped this particular stroke of fate. I suspected there were only so many of those sorts of meetings he could stomach.

We waited until the auditorium was empty, then I wheeled him out, down to the car park in the lift, and loaded Will up without incident. I didn’t say much; my head was still ringing with the music, and I didn’t want it to fade. I kept thinking back to it, the way that Will’s friend had been so lost in what he was playing. I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went. For some time, as we sat there in the audience, I had completely forgotten Will was even beside me.

We pulled up outside the annexe. In front of us, just visible above the wall, the castle sat, floodlit under the full moon, gazing serenely down from its position on the top of the hill.

‘So you’re not a classical music person.’

I looked into the rear-view mirror. Will was smiling.

‘I didn’t enjoy that in the slightest.’

‘I could tell.’

‘I especially didn’t enjoy that bit near the end, the bit where the violin was singing by itself.’

‘I could see you didn’t like that bit. In fact, I think you had tears in your eyes you hated it so much.’

I grinned back at him. ‘I really loved it,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I’d like all classical music, but I thought that was amazing.’ I rubbed my nose. ‘Thank you. Thank you for taking me.’

We sat in silence, gazing at the castle. Normally, at night, it was bathed in a kind of orange glow from the lights dotted around the fortress wall. But tonight, under a full moon, it seemed flooded in an ethereal blue.

‘What kind of music would they have played there, do you think?’ I said. ‘They must have listened to something.’

‘The castle? Medieval stuff. Lutes, strings. Not my cup of tea, but I’ve got some I can lend you, if you like. You should walk around the castle with it on earphones, if you really wanted the full experience.’

‘Nah. I don’t really go to the castle.’

‘It’s always the way, when you live close by somewhere.’

My answer was non-committal. We sat there a moment longer, listening to the engine tick its way to silence.

‘Right,’ I said, unfastening my belt. ‘We’d better get you in. The evening routine awaits.’

‘Just wait a minute, Clark.’

I turned in my seat. Will’s face was in shadow and I couldn’t quite make it out.

‘Just hold on. Just for a minute.’

‘Are you all right?’ I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.

‘I’m fine. I just … ’

I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against it.

‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about … ’ He swallowed.

Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.

‘I just … want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.’

I released the door handle.

‘Sure.’

I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.

My sister and I never really talked about what happened that night at the maze. I’m not entirely sure we had the words. She held me for a bit, then spent some time helping me find my clothes, and then searched in vain in the long grass for my shoes until I told her that it really didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have worn them again, anyway. And then we walked home slowly – me in my bare feet, her with her arm linked through mine, even though we hadn’t walked like that since she was in her first year at school and Mum had insisted I never let her go.

When we got home, we stood on the porch and she wiped at my hair and then at my eyes with a damp tissue, and then we unlocked the front door and walked in as if nothing had happened.

Dad was still up, watching some football match. ‘You girls are a bit late,’ he called out. ‘I know it’s a Friday, but still … ’

‘Okay, Dad,’ we called out, in unison.

Back then, I had the room that is now Granddad’s. I walked swiftly upstairs and, before my sister could say a word, I closed the door behind me.

I chopped all my hair off the following week. I cancelled my plane ticket. I didn’t go out with the girls from my old school again. Mum was too sunk in her own grief to notice, and Dad put any change in mood in our house, and my new habit of locking myself in my bedroom, down to ‘women’s problems’. I had worked out who I was, and it was someone very different from the giggling girl who got drunk with strangers. It was someone who wore nothing that could be construed as suggestive. Clothes that would not appeal to the kind of men who went to the Red Lion, anyway.

Life returned to normal. I took a job at the hairdresser’s, then The Buttered Bun and put it all behind me.

I must have walked past the castle five thousand times since that day.

But I have never been to the maze since.

13

Patrick stood on the edge of the track, jogging on the spot, his new Nike T-shirt and shorts sticking slightly to his damp limbs. I had stopped by to say hello and to tell him that I wouldn’t be at the Triathlon Terrors meeting at the pub that evening. Nathan was off, and I had stepped in to take over the evening routine.

‘That’s three meetings you’ve missed.’

‘Is it?’ I counted back on my fingers. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘You’ll have to come next week. It’s all the travel plans for the Xtreme Viking. And you haven’t told me what you want to do for your birthday.’ He began to do his stretches, lifting his leg high and pressing his chest to his knee. ‘I thought maybe the cinema? I don’t want to do a big meal, not while I’m training.’

‘Ah. Mum and Dad are planning a special dinner.’

He grabbed at his heel, pointing his knee to the ground.