The painting I’m making is almost two metres long, which is large but nowhere near as large as the canvas Rose used when she painted Grignons de Camargue. It must have been so hard for her, I realise now, being in the wheelchair. How did she do it? Because I find myself using my legs constantly, crouched and prowling like a big cat at the bars of a zoo enclosure as I work my way along the canvas, back and forth and back again. My clothes become drenched in sweat as I work for hours on end without a break until, physically driven to the brink of exhaustion, I collapse on the straw and take in deep gulps of air and then I rise to my feet and I continue once more. My shoulders and my arms hurt. My hands can barely hold the brush. But there, in front of my own eyes, I can see it now. My painting is beginning to take shape.

It seems so long ago now – was it really just a few days ago that Françoise and I were in the Pompidou Centre? On the fourth floor there was an exhibition of a famous British artist. His name was Francis Bacon, and I had thought his paintings were terrifying. He painted people as though they had been turned inside out, their portraits as bloody and meaty as one of Rose Bonifait’s trips to the abattoir. At the time, I thought his paintings were gross and ghoulish and yet I couldn’t stop staring at them. Their darkness compelled me. Now, my own work shares that same bleak beauty. I paint with death looking over my shoulder. I can feel its talons grasping at Claude, clawing at his open wounds and proud flesh, trying to drag him down and away from me forever.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

I put down my brushes and turn to find Françoise standing and watching at the stable door.

“I didn’t hear you,” I say. “Have you been there long?”

“Not very,” she replies. “I came because I thought you must be hungry so I brought you this,” she says, holding up a paper bag with a sandwich.

She doesn’t move to step inside. She looks so pale and grim, and there are tears running down her cheeks at the sight of Claude.

“His wounds are very bad, aren’t they?” Françoise says. And she asks me the question once more. “Is he going to die, Maisie?”

“I don’t know,” I say with brutal honestly.