Her lower jaw shot out and I saw a row of white, slightly uneven teeth. ‘I don’t mean buy one from me,’ she raised her voice. I should have stopped pushing it at that point, but it made no sense to me. She can’t be upset because I think she’s brilliant, I thought. I must be asking the wrong questions, putting it in the wrong way. No artist gets angry when you express an interest in buying their work—it simply doesn’t happen, I reassured myself. If I could only make this woman understand that I was serious, that I wasn’t just some airhead receptionist . . .

She had seized the picture and marched off into the back again. I decided to have one last try. I walked through to Saul’s framing room, and gasped when I saw what she was doing. Another artist’s work was spread out on the table, and she was leaning on it, leaning on a watercolour landscape that someone had probably taken weeks if not months to paint, writing a note for Saul. She was using a biro, pressing it down angrily as if that would help her make her point more emphatically. ‘Don’t lean on that,’ I said, shocked.

She stopped writing. ‘Excuse me?’

‘That’s someone else’s picture!’

‘It’s someone else’s appalling picture. And now it has my rather apposite words superimposed upon it, which makes it a hundred times more interesting.’

She’d done it deliberately. I read her words, the ones she planned to leave for Saul to find. Most of them were obscenities. If he didn’t take one look at that note and decide never to frame anything for this awful woman again, there was something wrong with him. I looked at the bottom of the scrap of paper for a signature, but there wasn’t one—I’d interrupted her before she’d had a chance to sign her letter.

I decided I didn’t want to buy Abberton after all. It would have spoiled it for me, knowing the person who had painted it thought nothing of vandalising another artist’s work.

I felt more upset than I could justify to myself. The picture I loved, even though I’d only seen it for the first time five minutes ago, had been ruined for me. More than that: it was as if art had been ruined, the thing that had started to cure the ache in my soul. Now it felt tainted. ‘Why do you want to destroy other people’s work?’ I asked, unable to stop myself. ‘Can’t you bear the idea of anyone having talent apart from you?’