Becky is fated never to become Lady Crawley. But sometimes the loser lives to fight another day. More poignant still are those proposals which hover on the brink of fulfilment rather than living on into reality.

No one conveys the sensation of love holding its breath better than Dick Francis, a master of the experience of unfulfilled longing. His heroes, bruised and bemused by life’s rough passage, can see new love glimmering and growing but hardly dare to hope that it can be for them. The defeats of the past have taught them that loving means losing, and the loser left with nothing but a legacy of painful memories and stifled sighs.

Sighs and the three-dot ending are very much the mood of Francis’ marvellous novel, Knock Down. The hero fall: hopelessly for a girl whose cool exterior conceals the pair of a damaged heart imperfectly restored after the death of her lover. She is drawn to him, too, but can they risk being hurt again?

Sophie telephoned at nine o’clock that evening. Her voice sounded so immediately familiar that it was incredible to think that I had known her for less than twenty-four hours . . .

She said, ‘How are your knight in shining armour instincts?’

‘Rusty.’

‘I could provide Brasso.’

I smiled. ‘What do you want done?’

‘Yes. Mm. When it comes to the point, I don’t know that I’ve got any right to ask.’

‘Will you marry me?’ I said.

‘WHAT did you say?’

‘Er . . I said. ‘Never mind. What was it you wanted done?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, I will. Marry you.’

I stared across the office, seeing nothing. I hadn’t meant to ask her. Or had I? Anyway, not so soon. I swallowed. Cleared my throat.

‘Then . . . you’ve a right to ask anything.’

‘Good,’ she said crisply. ‘Button your ears back . . ‘Right,’ I wrote it down. ‘Are you working tomorrow evening?’

‘No. Saturday morning.’

‘Then . . . I could come to your place . . . on my way home . .

`Yes.’ Her voice was tentative, almost embarrassed. `I live . .

`I know where you live,’ I said. `Somewhere at the end of the five-furlong straight of Sandown racecourse . . . I’ll be there.’

`I’ve got to go now, or I’ll be late.’ She paused, then said doubtfully, `Did you mean it?’

`Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so. Did you?’

`No,’ she said. ‘It’s silly.’

In these encounters the moment when the proposal of marriage is offered, and not accepted, forms the emotional climax of the affair. After this all the rest is a sad decline, full of reminders of how it used to be, as in this unforgettable exchange between the two doomed lovers in the 1937 movie, Camille. Garbo gives her finest performance as the ill-fated Camille, flashing from magical radiance to elegant restraint with her lover, Armand.

She is a wealthy cocotte, while he comes from a respectable family. In nineteenth-century Paris they are worlds apart. But their love is strong enough to bridge the chasm between them, and they come together for one idyllic summer at a country cottage. There they attend a wedding, which gives rise to the trembling hope that their own love for each other is strong enough to build on:

GARBO: Don’t ever leave me!

ARMAND: I never will — but you — I can’t bear our

summer to end —

GARBO: Nor 1.

ARMAND: Could you go on living like this? GARBO: I couldn’t live any other way now . . .

ARMAND: You mean you’d give up everything for me? GARBO: Everything in the world, everything.

THEY KISSGARBO: Never be jealous again. Never doubt that I love you more than the world, more than myself.

ARMAND: Then — marry me.

GARBO: What?

ARMAND: I married you today. Every word the priest said was meant for us. In my heart I made all the vows to you.

GARBO: And I to you.

ARMAND: Then —

GARBO: No, no — that isn’t fitting. Let me love you, let me live for you — don’t let me ask any more from Heaven than that — God might get angry.

Garbo’s last speech here has the same emotional power as the last line of another famous weepie of the black, white and silver screen, Now Voyager (1942): ‘Don’t let’s ask for the moon, when we have had the stars.’

America is another country. It’s constantly surprising that the new world can be so full of old pain. Surely the unmatched and unmatchable master of the moment of loss is F. Scott Fitzgerald. The situation of two people who are desperately in love yet who cannot overcome all the obstacles that keep them apart was one that haunted him all his life. It comes up in his very first story, and appears finally in the novel that he was writing at the time of his death, The Last Tycoon. This was a legacy of his own love and marriage with the beautiful Southern belle Zelda Sayre, which began and ended in such unhappiness that it obliterated all the good years in between.

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