‘She was the only Villiers girl at the time whose parents had one. Loads of families had helicopters, but their own jet? They’ve probably all got them now. Anyway, Martha’s privileged background had nothing to do with her not getting the job at Trinity. Aidan was a better painter than she was a writer, and she knew it.’

The room closes in on me. ‘Aidan was a painter?’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’

‘You never saw him painting? Never saw any of his work?’

‘He didn’t . . . he doesn’t paint.’ I am listening to a story about a stranger, trying to match the details to someone I thought I knew. ‘I’d know if he did. He . . .’ I shouldn’t want to tell her, but I do. There’s no reason not to. ‘When I met him, he was living in one room behind his workshop. There were empty frames all over the walls, frames he’d made—they’re still there, but there’s nothing in them.’

‘So he stopped,’ Mary says softly, rocking back and forth. ‘Good.’

‘Why would he do that? Why would he frame nothing?’ Why didn’t he tell me he knew about Gemma and Stephen? How did he know?

‘How many empty frames?’

‘I . . . I don’t know. I’ve never counted them.’

‘More than ten?’

‘Yes.’

‘As many as a hundred?’

‘No, nowhere near that. I don’t know, maybe fifteen, twenty.’

‘I know how many. Count them when you next get the chance—you’ll see I’m right.’

Everyone but me knows things they can’t possibly know. I don’t know even the things I could so easily have known. Should have known. Was Aidan’s family poor? Was he common, to use Mary’s word? I try to collect together in my mind everything he’s told me about his childhood: he loved animals, would have liked a cat as a pet but wasn’t allowed one. He never had his own bedroom, and wanted that more than anything: privacy. His brother and sister were much older than him, as remote as strangers.

‘There are eighteen,’ says Mary. ‘Eighteen empty frames.’

The Times, 23 December 1999

FUTURE FAMOUS FIVE

You might not know these names yet, but you soon will. From novelists and painters to actors, from singers to comedians, Senga McAllister talks fame and fortune with the young British talent heading your way.

Today I’m at Hoxton Street Studios to meet five unbelievably talented people. They’re doing a photo-shoot for a double-page spread in Vogue as part of its New Talent, New Style promotion, but they kindly spared a few minutes each, in between having their hair sprayed and their eyebrows plucked, to chat to me about how it feels to scale the dizzy heights of success.