No. She would time her trip to Paris to coincide with his visit, leaving Harry to look after the shop. The plan was sorted. All she needed was for Johnny to write.

The postman might not have guessed Connie’s condition, but he’d reached his own conclusions about why she was so eager for his arrival each day, and made regular quips about beaus and boyfriends and billet-doux.

One morning, he turned up grinning.

‘You’re in luck.’ He handed her a parcel. Miss Connie Littleton, it said, 24 Harrington Gardens. She recognised Johnny’s beautiful blue calligraphic writing – the hand of a proper artist – and her heart soared as she ran straight up to the attic. Taking her time, she examined the return address: a boulevard in Paris. An address; at last.

Slowly, heart pumping, she tugged at the string and peeled off the sticky brown tape. Inside she found an envelope and a package wrapped in silver paper. She set aside the envelope and opened the gift.

She unfolded a shawl, the colour of the painting in the gallery. The Virgin in Prayer.

That blue. It was lustrous, more vivid than any colour she had ever seen.

Johnny had told her about the paint. It had once been more precious than gold, and had come from the most prized stone in all the world, lapis lazuli, mined from deep within the earth. It was millions and millions of years old, revered by kings and queens and pharaohs. It had decorated masks and jewellery and been kept inside palaces and pyramids. It had been ground into a powder called ultramarine – the finest of all blue pigments, favoured by Titian and Vermeer and Perugino.

One day Johnny had said that his art would be recognised and then he would give her as much gold as she wanted. She had told him that she didn’t care about gold, that she only wanted him, and perhaps a shawl, the colour of the lady’s shawl in the painting. And now he had sent her that shawl.

Tears pooled in her eyes as she took the letter, drew out the single sheet of paper and read.

At first, she registered only fragments of sentences and odd words. She reached the end of the page and took a breath, looked up at the windows set in the roof. Clouds drifted across the sky above her and shafts of light picked out the dust. She heard the piano playing in the flat below, the faint scrabbling of mice. The scratch of a pigeon on the roof.

She studied the letter again and focused more clearly. He wrote about the beauty of Paris, Notre Dame and the Sacré Coeur. He talked of climbing the Eiffel Tower and walking in the Tuileries and visiting the Louvre. He had met so many talented artists, he said. Most of them were men, but there was a woman too who painted the most beautiful sunsets he had ever seen.