After lunch—a quick sandwich in the foyer café—I came to a stall that had me mesmerised. The artist was a woman called Gloria Stetbay, who looked scarily elegant. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her; she was surrounded by a tight circle of people who didn’t seem keen to make room for one more. Stetbay’s work was mostly abstract, and made me realise that many of the other abstracts I’d seen were far from being the real thing. Stetbay’s pictures looked like multi-coloured sand dunes, ruched and textured; I could have been looking at the skins of strange, glowing planets. She did things with colour and surfaces that made everything I’d seen up to that point look anaemic.

Aidan waved a flyer in front of my face. ‘You’re in good company,’ he said. ‘She’s got work in Charles Saatchi’s private collection.’ I didn’t give a monkey’s about Charles Saatchi. ‘Is this it?’ Aidan asked. ‘Have we found it?’

‘I can’t. The cheapest one’s two thousand pounds and it isn’t my favourite. I won’t tell you how much that is.’

‘I’ll buy you whatever you want,’ he said, surprised I didn’t know this without having to be told. ‘Which is your favourite?’

‘No. It’s too much.’

‘Nothing’s too much if it’s for you,’ he said solemnly. We were still standing inside Gloria Stetbay’s stall. Two American women next to us were talking about another art fair they’d been to that was much better attended on the first day. ‘London isn’t what it used to be,’ one said. ‘Even Frieze is starting to look like it’s trying too hard. And what is it with razor blades? Suddenly everyone’s covering their canvases with razor blades—is that supposed to be edgy?’

‘I didn’t know what it was like to have good feelings in me until I met you,’ Aidan said, not caring who heard. ‘I love the way you love art. I love the way you want to buy it, and keep buying it, not because of any bullshit about investment or profit or status but as a kind of good luck charm. You love it and you want it close to you, to ward off harm. It’s like magic for you, isn’t it?’

I nodded. I’d never expressed it in that way to myself, but he was right.