‘I won’t need to. It says here it’s all weekend. We could go on the Sunday.’ Aidan and I sometimes worked Saturdays if we were busy, which we usually were.

‘No. Take the Thursday off,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to an art fair you need to be there when it opens.’

‘The pictures can’t all sell before we get there,’ I protested. ‘The stuff I like best never sells, anyway. Apart from to me.’

‘That’s not why,’ said Aidan. ‘You’ve got to see the pictures before any of them are sold, or as few as possible. Once red dots start to appear, you look at the work in a different way: the successes and the failures. The popular ones and the rejects.’

‘Let’s go for the whole thing,’ I suggested, bobbing up and down on the balls of my feet, too excited to keep still. ‘Thursday to Sunday. If we’ve got a full four days, we’ll be able to see everything. I won’t have to choose too quickly, or panic that I’ve missed anything.’

Aidan’s face had lost its happy glow. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It might take that long to do it justice, but . . . Ruth, I can’t go. I can’t close up here, not even for a day. Too many people are relying on me for exhibition deadlines.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and heard my own disappointment thudding dully through the air, like a clumsily thrown ball. I couldn’t imagine going without him. We’d hardly been apart since the day we’d first met in August. ‘Can’t you . . .?’

‘Oh, sack it,’ he said, changing his mind so quickly that I didn’t understand what he was saying at first. ‘They can wait. They can all wait.’

‘You mean . . . you’ll come?’

‘I’ll come, but only for Thursday and Friday. I’ll go home Friday evening. Saturday and Sunday I’ll stay up all night if I have to and make up the time I’ve lost.’

I smiled. ‘So they won’t have to wait after all.’ Aidan pretends to have contempt for our artist customers, but I think secretly he admires them. Maybe he even envies them a little. How could he feel no affinity with artists, when his approach to his work is so creative? If he’s framing something for me, he doesn’t use ready-made mouldings. He starts from scratch. The same for himself: all the frames on the walls in his room behind the workshop are hand-made—the ones with nothing inside them. ‘They’re my only works of art,’ he once said. ‘Frame-makers used to be perceived as artists, and frames as works of art, before they were mass-produced. At one time, it was normal for a picture frame to cost more than the picture inside it.’

‘I’ll come back with you on Friday and help,’ I said. ‘Two days will be fine.’