My mother sold the house in Cornwall immediately when Hugo left me. She'd rented at first in London, while she looked, then bought an apartment a few roads down from me. I didn't argue with her. Didn't beg her not to come, to stay where she'd grown up, with her friends, her work, insist I was fine, because I knew she wanted to come and would be deeply unhappy if she didn't. Love is like that. And Celia didn't comment on the juggling act we performed that first year as the phone would ring and I'd shoot off to meet Mum somewhere, to take Peter to the park while she taught for an hour, then dash back to the studio. I knew I had to paint for my sanity and my mother knew that, too, and enabled me to do it. It was all that kept me from pills or drink, or whatever people normally did. When Peter went to bed I'd start again, often into the small hours. Sandy, next door, who's a writer, says the same. Says it saves a fortune on therapy.

I also wanted to be entirely financially independent from the Bellingdons. The apartment I couldn't do much about, nor later the school fees, but despite Hugo's insistence and Roger and Belinda's, too — I took no maintenance for Peter, and nothing for myself. Roger had even made a surprise visit one day, begging me to accept a handsome sum, but I wouldn't. I was selling paintings, I told him, portraits. I showed them to him in my studio, some already framed, waiting to be collected, already paid for. I could tell he was impressed. He even knew one of the generals I'd done recently. He'd gone off to his club, and then home on the train from Paddington, slightly appeased, but still fussed about the situation.

Gradually, of course, Celia and I had talked. And eventually, I told her everything, as she did me. About her overbearing parents — both professors — her excellent grades, her degree from Cambridge and their horror that all she wanted to do was paint. At least I'd never had any opposition to my career of choice. Instead, I told her about my dad, and then about Hugo. How it had felt to be bereaved all over again. Back then she hadn't slandered him at all, knowing I was far too fragile; she just listened. Later, of course, being Celia, she'd been more expansive on the morals of a man who could persuade his pregnant girlfriend to marry him and then abandon her with the baby, and I knew some of the attraction of coming down here had been to size up this mythical, demonic creature in the flesh. This was some admission, then. No wonder she'd paused before answering.