‘The day after our celebratory dinner, once I came back down to earth, I started to ask questions: when would I get the money? Was the gallery empty now, if my paintings had all sold? Aidan teased me for my ignorance, explained that the show stays up until the end of the final day, as planned. Buyers collect after take-down and that’s when they pay. He’d made me inflate the prices in order to be left with a decent whack once the gallery had taken its commission. He joked about taking commission himself, since he was the one who set it up. I never stopped to wonder why he’d want to help me to that extent. He was spending more time on me and my exhibition than he was on his own paintings. If I’d thought about it, I’d probably have decided it was down to my talent, which had overwhelmed him.’

I hear the self-hatred that underlies the casual sarcasm.

‘I knew how good I was. I could see it. Aidan was an artist—artists should care about art more than anything. I believed he did. Until I found myself in London one day visiting a friend, and decided to disobey his orders.’

‘You went to the gallery?’

‘I couldn’t resist.’ Mary turns on me. ‘Would you have been able to? I thought it couldn’t do any harm, as long as I didn’t go in. I was going to look in the window, nothing more, just to catch a glimpse of my work in that strange, exciting setting—a real gallery. I wanted to see the red sold stickers on the labels . . .’ Her words peter out. A solid, paralysing silence descends on the room, one I’m afraid to break.

‘Mary? What did you see?’

She doesn’t answer. I ask again.

‘He should never have told me the name of the gallery. Or he should have made one up—how hard is it to make up a name? He’s got no imagination. That’s why I’m a better artist than he ever was. Artists need imagination. Connaughton.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The gallery. Connaughton Contemporary. My pictures weren’t there. The man there had never heard of me. I rang Aidan, and when I told him what had happened, what I’d seen—not seen, rather—he told me to come back to the cottage. His voice sounded so . . . unwelcoming, so flat, nothing like the person I thought I knew. It was as if he’d been possessed by some remote, horrible stranger, and the old Aidan had been wiped out. That’s when I remembered that the old Aidan had driven Martha to suicide. I’d allowed myself to ignore what I knew about him in my desperation to latch on to someone after Martha’s death. We’d experienced the horror of it together—for a while, that was all that mattered.’