I get up and go to the cupboard. I ease my sketchbook out from under the photo album and the A–Z. I turn to my latest fledgling portrait of Dad. I look at it critically. The nose is not right, the angle of the forehead is all wrong. He looks too old. But it’s in pencil and I have a rubber. Or I can start again. I turn to a fresh page, run my fingers over the smooth cream cartridge paper. I get down my set of pencils and I start to sketch Dad again. I notice he has colours in the texture of his face you wouldn’t expect – greens and blues and greys and ambers, depending where the light catches its contours. I need colour; I will use oil paints on this one. If you add Cadmium Red and Phthalo Blue to Burnt Sienna you get the most amazing rich brown that’s the perfect shade for an Italian father’s eyes.

First, though, I need to get the lines right and I concentrate and I sit and work for an hour, looking and looking and making marks on the page – some light and feather-like, some purposeful and considered – and when I hold the sketchbook away from me I am quite pleased.

There’s a knock at the door. I put the sketchbook down and go to the window.

‘Who’s that?’ asks Dad, from under the headphones.

‘I don’t know. I can’t see anyone.’

Whoever it is must have tucked themselves right under the door frame. I really don’t want to go down. I don’t want to answer the door in a pair of Dad’s old tracksuit bottoms and a shabby white vest – I look either like an extra from The Sopranos, betraying my Italian roots in a really shameful manner, or like something from Rab C. Nesbitt. No one knocks on our door at this time of night. I really hope it’s not Kemp come back for his glasses.

After a few seconds there is another knock. I put the sketchbook back in the cupboard, huff the huff of those weary of the world and its cold-callers, and clank down the iron stairs in my bare feet to open the door to a grinning Salvi, who is standing there with a single tulip in his hand and his hair smarmed back. He’s wearing a very snappy suit and shiny shoes and looks far too gorgeous for the middle-aged-Sicilian-mafia-moll-on-their-day-off who’s just opened the door.

‘Hello, Prue,’ he says in a casual manner, like he didn’t run out on me last night.

‘Hello, Salvi,’ I say. ‘What are you up to?’ I am carefully and equally casual – though actually, of course, I am bloody delighted he is here. At least I look the part: if an outfit ever said ‘Couldn’t care less’ in capital letters, this is it.