‘Yes.’

She looked puzzled. ‘What, that’s it? I thought you loved my work. So much that you couldn’t wait to get your hands on it.’

‘It’s . . . it’s good. They’re all good.’ Two more of her paintings were up in the hall, one of a man, a woman and a boy sitting round a table, the other of the same man and woman, her looking in a mirror, him behind her, lying on the bed. Her face was visible only in the glass, reflected; her gaze seemed to taunt me, and I turned away. Against the drab wallpaper, Mary’s paintings stood out, vibrant and mesmerising, like diamonds shining out from a bed of sludge. The sight jarred; these pictures looked wrong here, violently out of kilter, yet without them the house would have had nothing. I had a powerful sense—one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had—that 15 Megson Crescent needed Mary’s paintings.

‘I know—you wouldn’t want them on your wall,’ she said, mistaking my awe for distaste. ‘A pretty scabby family, all things considered, but that’s life on the Winstanley estate. You’re brave to risk a visit. That lot don’t live here any more, but there are more of the same, and even worse.’

‘I’m not brave,’ I told her. Couldn’t she see I was petrified? Was she mocking me?

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I owe you an apology for what happened last June. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

Talk about something else. Please, change the subject. I’d clamped my mouth shut and my jaw was starting to ache.

‘I was frightened. Selfishly, I didn’t think . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished. ‘It still bothers you, doesn’t it? What happened at the gallery.’

How dared she expect confirmation from me? Rage began to blister inside me, but I tried to nod as if I felt fine. My natural reaction to anger: bury it before it’s used against me. Deny it an outlet. It was practically the first thing I learned as a child in my parents’ house: I wasn’t entitled to my natural responses, especially the more ‘un-Christian’ ones. I was allowed to manifest only those states of mind that would please my mother and father, make them proud of me. Anger, particularly anger directed at them, didn’t qualify.

‘Why does it still bother you?’ Mary waited for an answer I had no intention of giving her. ‘Do you blame yourself, is that it? Why do we do that? Human beings, I mean. Why do we take each mishap that strikes us, and twist it until it loses its randomness and becomes a big black arrow pointing at us, proving our worthlessness?’

Her words, so unexpected, went all the way through me. I knew I wouldn’t forget them for a long time.