Thea was quite relieved that Magenta had left for her hair appointment. She wanted to slip into the last gallery for the day on her own and just be an ordinary punter looking at art. She could ask questions later.

She found it quite easily, down a side street at the back of Harrods. From the outside she thought it looked far too small for Rory’s work, but Magenta had said that the curator was a big name and a good contact.

Once inside, the space was much larger than it had appeared, and wonderfully cool after the heat and dust outside. The weather had been getting hotter and more humid; thunder seemed inevitable. Thea decided she must make sure she was in a cab and on her way home before the storm broke and everyone wanted one.

She heard voices and, glad to slip in unnoticed, followed the sign to the exhibition upstairs. She could investigate the ground floor and find the owner later.

It was, she realised, the first gallery of the many they had seen that she actually envied. She had very little confidence in her abilities as a gallery owner, but she knew that none of the other spaces, or the way they had arranged the work, inspired her like this one. In some ways it was a relief. She had been beginning to think that she was too jealous of other galleries to judge them fairly. In this, she knew she was looking at true class.

It helped that she really liked the work. It was an eclectic mix of paintings, ceramics and three-dimensional work. She didn’t like all of it by any means, but she did respect it and felt that if art had been required always to please the eye it would never have progressed beyond tasteful paintings of children playing with puppies. She wondered, briefly, how her own puppies were getting on.

Some of the work she loved. There were wonderful paintings composed of the purest pigments, red so intense that from some angles it looked black, scored with a slash of a palette knife so the paper beneath was revealed. Others were blue-black, the night sky distilled and intensified into a three-foot square.

As she wandered around she realised that this was the standard she was aiming for and that she didn’t want anything less good in her gallery.

The voices still murmured on but she decided to go downstairs anyway. Her curiosity about what might be there lured her on.