Thea had also brought a sleeping bag and pillow to the gallery, in case she felt too tired to drive back. With Lara and the puppies for protection, a radio for company and a little stash of goodies for comfort, she felt equipped for a marathon of varnishing.

Molly had offered to do it with her, declaring that she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. But as Thea knew this wasn’t true and that the offer was made out of duty rather than a desire to get a repetitive-stress injury, she refused. Molly was proving a boon. Her bullying nature – or ‘managerial qualities’ as Thea now referred to them for diplomatic reasons – had come in very useful when it came to persuading magazines to accept their advertisements after their deadline, for wheedling important names and addresses out of people who couldn’t usually be wheedled, and for giving the electrician hell when Thea was too nice to him. She was brazen about contacting people for publicity and persuaded several large local companies to sponsor the brochure in exchange for a very insignificant entry on the back page. So far, she and Thea hadn’t fallen out and it was Molly who asked Thea what she intended to do or show ‘after Rory’.

Up to now, Thea hadn’t thought about ‘after Rory’. Getting the gallery ready and his work into it was all she’d focused on. But Molly was quite right. Rory was only the beginning and she still had uncomfortable feelings about his commitment to the gallery. He’d rung her late one night, from a pub, and given her half an address, but he didn’t sound like he was planning to come back any time soon.

‘You need a theme, darling,’ Molly had said, tentatively stroking Lara who had come upstairs into Thea’s sitting room for some time away from her children. ‘"Seascapes and Sunsets", something like that.’

Thea mentally reached for her sick bucket, but took the point.

‘Then you put in a call for work and people send you slides. The girl at the magazine was awfully helpful when I explained I – er – we were opening a new gallery. Students are always desperate for somewhere to show their work, she said, but we must be careful about quality and make sure we don’t have anything too weird or it won’t sell. I think we want some nice watercolours. People always like those.’

Thea picked a spot of white paint off her trousers. This was crunch time. This was when she had to explain to Molly that her vision of what the gallery should do was quite different from what Molly obviously had in mind. ‘Actually, Molly, I do want to show weird stuff, even if it doesn’t sell.’

‘But Thea! How on earth will we make any money if we can’t sell the work?’