Big Lou shook her head. ‘Matthew isn’t like that, Angus. He’s not like you.’

Angus showed his indignation. ‘Like me? Of course I appreciate beauty – I’m an artist, as you may have observed, Lou. What artist isn’t sensitive to beauty – in all its forms?’

‘Aye, well, that may be so,’ said Big Lou. ‘But I’ve got better things to do than to listen to your blethering.’

But Angus had sown the seed in his own mind, even if not in Big Lou’s. He wondered whether Elspeth Harmony had met the new assistant yet, and what she would think about her. Would any wife be happy to think that her husband was working in close proximity to a girl like that? We are weak creatures, thought Angus. We are very weak, and what woman does not sense that, no matter how constant her husband appears to be; what woman does not fear that deep weakness in the make-up of every man? It may be no more than a niggling doubt – a twinge of insecurity – but it is there.

Back in his studio, on the day of that first encounter with Kirsty – through the glass – Angus found his thoughts returning to the young woman. He closed his eyes, recreating the vision he had been vouchsafed: Kirsty, with her back turned towards him at first, her long hair over her shoulders, half turning to reach for something at the side of her desk, thus affording him a view of her profile; such perfection of proportion and attitude, like a gazelle glimpsed in the half-cover of grass, a pert gazelle, nervous, ready to bolt if it sensed an observer.

Iris Murdoch once revealed that the idea for an entire novel had come to her following upon the sight of a boy on a road, caught in the headlights of a car. Why should not an entire painting – a Judgement of Paris – come to the eye of an artist who looks through a window? Yes, a Judgement of Paris, with Matthew’s assistant as Aphrodite herself, resolute, calm, and, as in Jan Brueghel’s treatment of the subject, disrobed. Would she agree, he wondered.

21. Impressionists and Post-Impressionists