Mary grabs a strand of her hair and puts it in her mouth, chewing it as if it’s a curl of liquorice. ‘When he’d finished painting, he took her for lunch. In college, surrounded by other people. He told her he was flattered, thought she was amazing, but didn’t want to get involved with anyone—said he’d find it too stressful. He could have told her that when he wrote to her, saved her the trip, instead of leaving her to wonder if something about her in the flesh hadn’t lived up to his memory of her. After lunch he sent her away. She wrote to him every day for a long time—her feelings hadn’t changed—but he hardly ever wrote back. When he did, his letters were chatty, anodyne—as short as he could get away with. I also wrote to him once or twice: hate mail.’

Mary tries to smile. ‘You know what I’m like when I get angry. I couldn’t bear what he was doing to her. In the end she stopped writing to him and started writing a novel instead. All about him, and her obsession with him. It wasn’t so much a book as a self-indulgent splurge, but apparently I was the only person who thought that. It got published. When it came out, she sent him a copy. She got his reply two days later—a card, thanking her for sending it, and quoting Gore Vidal. I suppose you know the famous quote?’

It’s a few seconds before I realise she wants a response from me. Not giving her what she wants doesn’t occur to me. ‘No.’

‘ “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.” ’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘Plenty of things are horrible,’ she says impatiently. ‘If they’re true, it doesn’t matter, but that’s not true, not of me, anyway. I’d only want someone to fail if I disliked them. Wouldn’t you?’ She doesn’t wait for my answer. ‘Anyone else would have torn up Aidan’s card and written him off as the arsehole that he is, but not Martha. Do you know what her take on it was?’ When Mary laughs, it sounds as if she’s choking, fighting for breath. She looks limp, like a doll that’s had the stuffing pulled out of it. ‘At least he thought of her as a friend.’

‘What?’

‘ “Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies.” Martha decided to minimise the hurt to herself by taking it as a declaration of friendship, something she’d not had from him before.’

I flinch. This is too personal a detail. I feel as if I’m invading Martha Wyers’ privacy, ransacking the mind and heart of an unhappy dead woman. I ought to tell Mary to stop. I don’t.