‘What do you mean?’

‘Penetration occurred, but that was about it. Aidan couldn’t hack it.’

‘Martha told you?’

‘Later, after he’d packed her in, she started to tell everyone, even her parents, because she didn’t understand. She had to understand everything, Martha. The world had to make sense, or she couldn’t cope. At the time she hadn’t minded the sex being bad because of what had gone with it. Aidan had told her he loved her, that he had ever since the day of the interview at Trinity.’

Mary jumps down from the windowsill where she’s been sitting and starts to pace restlessly. There’s excitement in her voice, as if this is the part she’s been looking forward to. ‘He told her exactly what she wanted to hear: that he’d known she was special, that he’d repelled her advances only because he was frightened of the strength of his feelings for her. He talked about the future, said he never wanted them to be apart again. He had to leave the hotel early the next morning to go to the National Portrait Gallery, where he was artist in residence. When he kissed her goodbye, he said, “I’ll be in touch. Almost immediately.”’ Mary laughs. ‘Martha was a writer. Words mattered to her. If she was certain that was what he said, then that was what he said.’

‘He didn’t get in touch.’ My question comes out as a statement of fact. The story, though new to me, is eerily familiar. Aidan did the same thing to me: told me he loved me, proposed marriage, held me all night in our room at the Drummond Hotel, then became remote and distant immediately afterwards, withdrawing more with each day that passed. Even as he moved his things into my house, he was removing himself from my life.

‘He didn’t get in touch at first,’ says Mary. ‘Martha wrote to him and phoned him—nothing. No response. Finally, when she couldn’t think of anything else to do, she waited outside the National Portrait Gallery for him. Every day for a week, but he didn’t appear. She went in and asked about him, and they told her his residency had finished the week before. He’d moved too, and not given her his new address. That’s when she started to tell the whole story to anyone who’d listen—waiters, barmen, taxi-drivers. She was a total embarrassment, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know how it could happen: how can a man say he’ll love you for ever one minute, then disappear the next?’

The smoke in the room is starting to get to me, even though the window’s open and Mary finished the last of her cigarettes a while ago. I offer what seems to me to be the obvious answer. ‘Men say that sort of thing to get women into bed.’