“I thought he wanted to take me to Australia.”

He roars with laughter. “I’ll leave that sort of thing to you. I don’t believe many songs adequately convey my message of ‘please leave my bed now and fuck off.’”

I laugh. “No, that is a bit of a niche market.” I eye him curiously. “Have you ever been in a relationship?”

He shakes his head. “Never.”

“Really?”

“Why do you sound so astonished?”

“Because I am, Mags. Most people have been in some form of a relationship by the time they get to our age.”

He considers my words of wisdom with a wry look on his face. “I’ve had a few arrangements that lasted a couple of months. That’s about as far as I go.”

“Goodness. Are the men okay? How much did their mental health suffer?”

He chuckles and pours us another shot. “I suppose you have a string of very serious relationships behind you where you quoted Proust to each other and haggled over the price of expensive bedlinen.”

I turn my head to stare at him. “You have very bizarre ideas about relationships.” He keeps looking at me in query, and I remember his question. “I’m actually the same as you.” He makes a disbelieving sound, and I laugh. “It’s true. I’ve had a few relationships, but nothing ever lasted, because they couldn’t compete with my work.” I purse my lips. “That sounds so fucking pretentious, but it’s true. I always cared more about painting than I did having someone to eat dinner with.”

“It’s not pretentious at all. It would be arrogant to squander your talent.” He throws his drink back and winces. “I suppose I am the same. My work has always been the most important thing in my life.” He shrugs. “My parents’ relationship was volatile, to say the least. They had an open relationship, so there were always different partners around the house. It also seems that they both had different versions of what ‘open’ actually meant, so there were rather a lot of screaming rows between very scantily clad people. It made me very popular at school because everyone wanted to come to my house, but it didn’t exactly leave me with any strong desire to do a relationship myself.”

I settle back into the sofa, raising my legs and stretching out. “When did you come to England?”

“You’re rather chatty tonight.” I watch him silently, letting the moment stretch, and he rolls his eyes. “My parents divorced when I was ten. When I was thirteen, my mother sent me to England to live with my father. She wanted to paint, and I was starting to cramp her style.”

“How?”

He shoots me a mischievous look. “I began to be critical about her love life.”

“Didn’t you want her to have one?”

“One would have been fine. It was the volume I was talking about.”