‘That’s crazy,’ said Aidan, his back to me as he foraged in the fridge again. ‘An artist who won’t sell any of her work? I’ve never heard of that before.’

I shivered. Crazy. Like having empty frames all over your walls, with no pictures in them.

‘So? What happened?’ Aidan asked.

‘She accused me of harassing her.’ I took a sip of my orange juice, hoping he would leave the subject alone.

‘Sounds like a standard shit day at work,’ he said. ‘Why did you leave? Hansard weighed in on your side, didn’t he?’

He sounded as if he was guessing. Saul hadn’t told him.

Aidan handed me another cheese sandwich. It had dents in the bread from his thumb and forefinger. He looked down at me, frowning. ‘You’ll have to toughen up,’ he said. ‘I’m not having you resigning on me after the first visit from some awkward bugger artist.’

I ate my food to avoid having to answer.

‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ said Aidan, watching me carefully. ‘Isn’t there?’

I nodded.

For a second he looked wary, perhaps even afraid. ‘You’re just like me,’ he said. ‘I knew it, soon as I saw you. That’s why I gave you a hard time.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I won’t ask again.’ He stared at the empty frames on his walls, as if making some kind of silent pact with them.

I was smiling at him when he turned to face me, and he smiled back. Having established the ground rules, we could both relax. From that point on, we talked about art, framing—things we were happy to talk about. Aidan started—immediately, while I was still eating—to tell me everything he knew about his craft, everything he thought I should know. He told me that all the concepts and designs in picture-framing come from classical architecture. He dug out dusty hardback books from under piles of black T-shirts and faded jeans, and showed me photographs of tabernacle frames and trompe l’oeils and cassettas, explaining what each one was. He railed against people like Saul, who didn’t read up on the history of picture-framing, whose libraries on the subject were less extensive than his own, and against all the art books that contained photographs of unframed pictures, free-floating against a black background, as if the frame were not crucial to the work of art.

I remember being struck by his anger, his apparent determination to make my brain a replica of his, containing the same information. Apart from the bits that were missing, that is. He didn’t tell me, not then and not ever, why he had framed emptiness and hung it on his walls. And I didn’t give him the missing details from the story about why I’d left my job at Saul’s gallery. I’d made what had happened sound so straightforward, but it wasn’t at all—my reaction to the picture, my conviction that I had to have it, all the different ways I’d tried to persuade the artist to sell me some of her work, hounding her so that she had no choice but to lash out at me . . .