‘There you go.’ Leanne motioned towards the remaining empty easel, where a few brushes and pots of paint were laid out. She glanced to her left, where a box-fresh set of extremely expensive gouaches was being arranged in perfect rainbow order. To her right, a woman with her hair tied back in a Hermès scarf was rubbing Clarins moisturiser into her hands. Obviously Leanne’s commitment to the avant garde was not without its limits.

‘We’re going to start today,’ said Leanne, carefully dropping Ts and Gs, ‘with an exploration of colour. I want you to let yourselves go wherever you feel like going. Don’t think about what you’re painting, what it’s meant to be, just take the paint on to the paper and let it speak for itself.’

This was starting to sound a bit like occupational therapy, and Victoria wondered if any of the women would start crying in the next half hour.

She opened up a pot of red paint, stuck the biggest brush she could find right into it, and made a big red circle on the paper in front of her.

‘Wow,’ said Leanne, squatting down beside her, ‘someone’s had a bad day.’

‘Bad year, more like,’ said Victoria, flashing back to the events leading up to Fashion Week. Oh, the nonsense of that fucking dragon dress! She found the green, cut a load out with a palette knife and slathered it across the page. It dragged the red with it in rather pleasing, bleeding lines. She flicked the knife up just before it reached the edge; a few splatters of green showered on to the paper, on to her clothes.

‘That’s it!’ said Leanne. ‘Stop right there! Ladies, I think we have a finished piece.’ She took the pad off Victoria’s easel, held it up for inspection. ‘Now that is what I’m talkin’ abaht!’

When she got home, feeling more exhilarated than she’d felt at any time since getting back from New York, Victoria wanted to talk to someone about the new direction she could see her life going, the untapped talent that had been maturing in her for all these years (so Leanne said), the creative potential that we all have if only we knew how to access it . . .

Instead, she found Joel in the kitchen, putting what looked approximately like a shepherd’s pie in the oven, and wearing – no surprises there, then – a little frilly apron that he must have found at the back of one of the drawers, and nothing else. It did frame his arse rather sweetly, she had to admit, and appeared to be rising at the front.

‘Dinner will be ready in about an hour,’ he said, taking her by the hand and leading her to the bedroom. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been doing a bit of tidying up and sorting out.’

‘What . . .’

‘And look what I found in your bedside table.’