I met Graham just after I’d turned thirty-three and had been unattached for four years. I’d signed up to do a life-drawing class in the evenings in the church hall in Highgate. I had arrived ten minutes early and found my way to the classroom at the back of the building, and there he was, at a desk in the corner, looking like Santa Claus’s younger brother with his sandy-coloured hair and beard. ‘Hi, find a place,’ he said. ‘I’m Graham White, the tutor for the evening, and you are?’

‘Bea Brooks.’

‘Ah, like that Hollywood movie star from the 1920s?’

‘You’re thinking of Louise Brooks.’

He smiled and ticked my name off his list. ‘Probably. Must be the hairstyle as well as the name.’

I’d had my long hair cut into a short bob after Joe and I had split up, and taken to wearing tailored vintage riding jackets, usually sourced on Portobello Road, jeans and brogue shoes. Graham looked in his forties and appeared to also favour clothing from past decades, with his corduroy trousers and Harris jackets, picked up from the charity shops he loved to frequent.

Other students arrived, our life model appeared. She was a young, stick-thin girl with a shock of soft blonde hair. She stripped off, took her pose for the start of the evening and off we went, beginning with a series of quick charcoal sketches, then moving on to a longer study until the end of the class.

Graham was a good teacher, encouraging as well as critical, and my drawing improved enormously under his guidance. There wasn’t an immediate attraction, although I liked him from the start. There was more a feeling of respect for his knowledge and his own considerable talent. He taught at an art college in the day, spent his Monday nights doing the evening class I attended, Saturdays he volunteered and taught art in a local prison. Our tutor/student relationship grew into a friendship. We spent time in the pub after classes with other students, all of us eager to learn from him.

It was in the term after Easter that I began to have feelings for Graham and found myself looking forward to Monday nights, hanging about afterwards with some excuse or other, feeling that I’d miss our times together once the class broke up for the summer. I never imagined the feelings were mutual because there wasn’t the slightest hint or glance from him to say that he felt the same way.