“We're renting the cottage for a pittance, nothing like the usual rent, and only because I insisted." She didn't answer and we walked along in silence.

At length, I sighed. "Oh, d’you know what? You're right. She's a nightmare. And I don't want to talk about Belinda, anyway."

"Quite. Let's not give her the pleasure. She thinks the world revolves around her as it is."

"How did you get on with Hugo?"

She paused. We were picking our way along the rutted clay track towards the sea in the dark and she bent to get a stone out of her shoe, but I knew she was considering her words. She straightened up. "Well, I'm loath to say it, but he's a very nice man."

I glowed beside her in the dark, the terrible, shining beam of true love for a false god. "I knew you'd say that. If you were honest. Knew you couldn't possibly say otherwise."

Celia hadn't really met Hugo before, apart from at the odd school play of Peter's. She'd arrived in my life just after he'd departed, when I'd put an ad in the Art Newspaper offering half a studio for rent, to an artist who kept to themselves. I'd even said that. I hadn't wanted to talk. I had sitters, obviously, so a chatterer wouldn't have worked, but I didn't have the words, at the time. A garrulous, Bluebeard the Pirate type with copious facial hair, a booming voice and no doubt canvases as big as his personality had arrived, and then Celia, who painted small, delicate pictures back then, and who, unbeknownst to me, had just split up with her boyfriend, had a row with her parents who wanted her to be a lawyer, and didn't want to talk either. We'd painted in companionable silence for weeks, and she never asked about the father of the child I appeared to have: the one that had gone by the time she arrived, but appeared at about four o’clock each day when Mum brought him back.