I realise, suddenly, that the sun's almost set. I'm not cold, but my skin prickles.

I say, 'We don't have any glasses. We'll have to drink straight from the bottle.'

'OK,' he says, and takes a gulp. A drop of champagne rolls down from the corner of his mouth, fizzing. 'Wait you probably shouldn't swim if you've been drinking. Swim first. I'll save you half a bottle.' He gives me a wide, untrustworthy grin, and I laugh.

'Yeah, right.'

'No, I'm serious. Afterwards. I don't know how I'd break it to your parents that I let you drown.'

I open my mouth and shut it again. Then I turn away and undress down to my bra and knickers. I don't think he's watching but my nerves tingle as if he is. I'm not exactly embarrassed I told him he could watch, after all but I sidle towards the pond because I can't bring myself to look in his direction. I jump in, and it's icy. I hear myself yelp, and when I've wiped the water out of my eyes and found my feet in the mud Oliver's laughing at me, holding the bottle of champagne in both hands so that he doesn't spill it.

I roll over on to my back and tread water, looking up at the trees. Now that the sun's set the light is green-grey-blue, the sky high and clear. I love the feeling of weightlessness, like I'm not real. Oliver's stopped laughing now and all I can hear is the click-rattle-chirrup of the stream and my own heartbeat. I hold my breath and put my face underwater, but it's too dark to see anything. The water seems warmer now, just cooler than my body. It's lovely. I float in silence.

After a while the water is lighter than the sky. It ripples round me, opalescent. I pick it up in my hands, half expecting it to be opaque and silvery against my skin.

It's almost completely dark before I stand up and wade back towards the bank. Oliver's watching me, his hands round his knees. There's a breeze, and suddenly I'm freezing. My teeth start to chatter.

'Sorry, I don't have a towel. You'd better use this.' He holds out something dark to me, and when I take it I realise it's his T-shirt. I wipe the water off my face and when I look up again he's standing up with my clothes in his arms. He passes my T-shirt to me, then my jeans, and I lean on him while I drag them on. The denim sticks to my damp legs. I'm a little bit warmer but I'm still shivering. He stands in front of me, his hands in his pockets. Then, suddenly, he reaches out, pulls me towards him and starts to rub my back in a brisk older-brother kind of way. He's put on a jumper, and I press my face against it, taking in the clean-laundry warmth, feeling his arms round me. 'You'll warm up in a sec,' he says. 'I've got another sweater in my bag. You can borrow that if you want.'

'I'm OK.'

Somehow we sit down, so that I'm cross-legged, leaning back against him. He dries my hair for me, very carefully, like he's scared of breaking it. I'm still shaking, and he puts his arms round me and squeezes, so that I feel the warmth of his whole body. 'Better?'

No would be a lie, and I don't want to say yes. So I stay quiet.

'You should go home. It's getting late.'

'I haven't had my champagne yet,' I say, and I hear him laugh. The vibration goes through my back and straight to my heart.

He shifts, and reaches backwards. I'm leaning on him, so I move too, until we're lying down, my head on his chest. He grunts, and then makes a satisfied noise. 'Got it. Here we go.' He passes the bottle to me. I have to tilt my head forward to drink. The champagne's warmish and flat, but it tastes great.

I prop it in the crook of my elbow and look up at the patch of clear sky above the pond. The stars are starting to come out.

I say, 'Do you want me to move?'

'It's fine.'

'Because I know you don't want to '

There's a pause, and I hear him swallow. 'I never said I didn't want to.'

There's another pause. The undergrowth rustles as the dark things start to wake up. I open my mouth, but I'm smiling so hard I'm not sure I'll be able to make words.

'Bibi,' he says, very softly, into my hair, 'if you laugh, or say anything, or make so much as a joke I swear I'll ' He hesitates. Then he puts on a theatrical, reading-aloud kind of voice, parodying himself. 'I'll break your neck in one swift practised movement like a stick of sugar candy.'

'Rock,' I say. 'Not "sugar candy". Rock.'

'God, teenagers,' he says. 'You have to have the last word.'

'Yes,' I say.

He shakes his head and we both laugh quietly, as if neither of us wants to break the silence. And we lie and look up at the stars.

VII.

It's starting to get light. I lift my head a little and the sky above the trees is so blue and clear I want to touch it.

I say, 'Are you asleep?'

Oliver yawns and I feel him shake his head. 'No. Are you?'

'Definitely. Can't you tell?' I lie back down, resting my head in the hollow between his shoulder and his chest. He got his spare sweater out of his bag for me fumbling around by the light of his cigarette lighter when I woke up at midnight, freezing and not sure where I was, but even so I'm cold. The warmth of his body is comforting, and his sweater is like another pair of his arms, hugging me. I breathe in his smell. I'm knackered and covered in midge bites, and my neck aches from leaning on him all night, but I don't want to go home.

'It'll be morning soon.'

I don't answer. If I pretend we can stay like this for ever, maybe we can.

'Bibi? You should go home. Your parents won't your parents be '

'Not yet,' I say. 'I want to watch the sun come up. Forget my parents.'

'Oh. OK,' he says, and yawns again. 'I wonder what time the first train is.'

'To Gatwick?' I raise my head again to look at him, but there's not enough light yet to see his expression.

'Yeah. Well, to Tonbridge.'

'Have you booked your flight?'

'I'll get the first one I can, when I get to the airport.'

I feel sick. I sit up. My hair's sticking to my cheek where I was leaning on him, and I brush it away. 'When are you coming back?'

'Probably never.'

'OK.'

'Bibi, you knew I said, all along. I told you '

'I said it's OK.' I look up at the sky. It looks fragile. If you hit it with a hammer it would shatter, with a huge musical smash. 'What about Tyme's End? I thought you weren't going to sell Tyme's End?'

'I'm not. I'll get my solicitors to give it to you. Miss Habibah Hope of 19, Marks Cross Road, Falconhurst.'

'Very funny.'

'I'm not joking.'

I look round at him. He shrugs and smiles. In the half-light his face is pale, eaten away by shadows like an old man's. I wonder suddenly what his grandfather looked like. 'But I thought '

'You want it, don't you? This.' He gestures to the smooth, blue-grey water and the trees. 'I don't mean the hou- not just the house. I'd like you to have this.'

'I thought you . . .' I don't know what to say.

'As an apology,' he says, and runs his hand over my hair and down my back.

It makes me shiver. 'You don't have anything to apologise for.' I turn my head so that his cheek is only a few centimetres from my mouth. He's still smiling, but not at me. 'Really Oliver, you don't have anything I promise, there's nothing to apologise for.'

'That's what you think,' he says. Then he turns and kisses me, very lightly, on the mouth. It's so quick and gentle it's like something brushing past me: a ghost, a memory, a premonition of a kiss.

I go to kiss him back, but he's already getting to his feet.

'Come on,' he says. 'Let's get this trash cleared up before the sun rises.'

The dawn is beautiful. I'm not sure I've ever seen the sun come up before not watched it rise, like this, concentrating on every second as the sky goes green and lemon-green and amber and rose. We stand a little way apart, and even though we can't see the sun through the trees the sky is so lovely I want to pause it, like a TV, and keep it like that for the rest of my life. It makes me sad to know I'll only see it once, and then it'll be gone. I feel like I'll never see anything as good ever again.

I say, 'What's the time?' because if he says how beautiful it is I'll start to cry.

'Five past five.'

'What time's your train?'

'First one's about quarter to six, I think.'

'And that's the one you're getting.'

'Yes,' he says.

'Then you should go,' I say. 'It'll take half an hour to walk there, probably.'

He glances at me and nods. 'Will you come to see me off?'

'If you want me to.'

Suddenly he pulls me sideways, so I stumble into him, and he puts his arms round me and squeezes me so tightly it's hard to breathe. 'Yes,' he says. His mouth is next to my ear, and it tickles. 'Yes, I'd like you to.'

I clench my jaw, because I'm not going to cry until he's safely on the train to the airport.

'I'm really glad I met you, Bibi.' He pulls back, his hands on my shoulders, and smiles. 'I can't tell you how glad. If I hadn't I don't know what I would've done.'

'Good,' I say. 'Great. That's excellent.'

He watches me for a second, and then laughs. 'Yeah, OK. I'm getting sentimental. Sorry. Forget it.'

'Yeah,' I say, although I know I won't forget it, ever.

'Let's go,' he says. And we start to walk up through the trees towards the house and the bit of broken wall that I know better than my own front door by now.

I thought it would be quiet it feels quiet but actually there's birdsong and things rustling and there's already the occasional swish of a car from the road. I hear a motorcycle drone past, cutting out at the loudest point, and an aeroplane goes overhead, leaving a double trail on the blue like a scar. Everything's wet, shining with dew, and it smells of fresh air.

Then Oliver stops dead, and points. 'Bibi. Look.'

For a moment I don't know what I'm seeing. Tyme's End, with reddish copper light blazing through the windows, the panes glaring the colour of fire. For an odd second my heart jumps into my throat. But the light's too even, too still, to be a real fire: it's only the dawn reflected in the glass. I breathe out slowly, half wanting to laugh. It's as beautiful as the sunrise, but in a different way. I can feel goose pimples prickling on my arms. Everything goes very still, as if we've walked into a photo.

There's something wrong. I don't know what it is, but 'I think it remembers,' Oliver says. His voice is funny, quiet and focused, as if he's talking to someone hidden, just within earshot. 'I think especially now, at dawn, in summer . . . I think Tyme's End knows what happened there, all the things that happened, the things that people don't know and can't ever know. I think the past leaves traces that we can't see. And sometimes . . . We think things have gone, when they haven't.'

I don't want him to go on. I really don't want him to go on. I close my eyes and dig my nails into my palms, because there's something I don't want him to say any more. I wasn't scared last night, but now in this glorious, chirping, dazzling morning I am.

'I think . . . we look at the past. And sometimes it looks back at us.'

I squeeze his hand, pressing it against my leg. 'Oliver '

He looks down at me, his eyes narrowing as if he's trying to remember who I am. Then he shakes his head. 'Sorry.'

'You're freaking me out. I don't know why. You looked like someone else.'

'Someone better-looking, I hope.' He grins, but that other expression the trace of unfamiliarity is still just visible.

I shrug and pull him forward. 'Let's go. Your train.'

'Wait. I ' He doesn't move. He's still got hold of my hand. 'There's something I . . . Will you give me a minute?'

'What?'

'I want to go and say goodbye. I know it sounds stupid. Just go and have a last cigarette and . . . look round.'

'It's not stupid.'

He nods, the corners of his mouth turning up, but his eyes are distant, staring over my shoulder at the house. He says, 'My grandfather died there. I was upstairs when he I came downstairs, at dawn, and found him.'

I haven't got a clue what to say. I still feel a dragging, dull pain in my gut. It takes me a moment to realise it's fear.