Instead I set about making the fish pie, the only thing I'm good at, but, as Celia and I agree, you only need one. More than one, and guess who's doing the cooking? It involved smoked haddock, salmon, scallops, eggs and two different kinds of cheese and breadcrumbs, not to mention cream and lemon juice, and I flicked on some music and opened a bottle of wine as I went about it. Then I laid the table with a cloth in the garden, found some candles and even began to enjoy myself — the wine helped. So that by the time Ted rang the doorbell I was approaching the mood.

"You don't need to ring," I told him as I answered the door. He was standing there with a bunch of flowers.

“I dithered,” he admitted. “But somehow these made it too formal to barge in.”

I grinned as he handed them to me. “Thanks. I love white roses."

"Except they're refusing to open. They're all tight and clenched and they've resisted all my advances. I even put them in the airing cupboard.”

“Perhaps they're nervous.”

“Or playing it cool.”

Over supper, which Ted was suitably enamored with, and which he helped make a salad for, or at least tossed some leaves in a bowl, and opened some more wine, he asked me how Roger's portrait was coming along.

"It's good. I might not have said that three days ago, but today it's good." I popped a scallop in my mouth. Chewed on in silence.

He blinked, amused. “That's it?"

I sighed. Put my fork down. This again. “Thing is, Ted, it's so sort of . . . internal." I tried to explain. Never could. "I can't really talk about it. It's not that I'm precious about it, it's just — I don't know. It would be like talking to myself. Having a conversation with myself, and what's the point of that? To be honest, I'm always amazed when people have an opinion on it. I mean, good or bad. I do it for me."

He nodded. "I get that."

“I do it for me, and it's about me, and I have a friend who's a poet who says the same. Says when people say they've enjoyed his latest volume, he thinks, what on earth are you doing reading that? What do you mean, you bought it in Waterstones? It's weirdly private, but of course, it's not. Disconcertingly, by definition, it's also incredibly public.”

“Do you hate exhibiting?”

“Oh, I loathe it. But I don't have to, mine are private commissions. But ask Celia about opening nights, she almost cuts her throat. One time, a couple of years ago, she didn't even show up. It was a joint exhibition, so the other guy did, happily, but it wasn't nerves or stage fright; it was just — what are you all doing here? Looking into my heart?”