After her bath, he would bring her a large towel that he would have specially heated on the towel rail.

‘It really is very kind of you,’ Elspeth said. ‘But I think I can manage. Why don’t you go for a run in Queen Street Gardens?’

The suggestion had been intended to be a helpful one – Matthew liked going for a run in the mornings – but he had taken this badly.

‘But I want to be here to help you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you like what I do for you?’

She had reached out to embrace him, dropping the towel. Matthew shivered with delight. ‘Of course I do, my darling,’ she whispered. ‘Of course I do. You do whatever you like.’

She realised how fortunate she was. Many women had husbands who were not in the least attentive – husbands who never ran their wives’ baths, nor made their breakfast, nor sent roses to the flat during the day, as Matthew often did. She was so lucky, but of course one needed a bit of space in a marriage, and she knew that sooner or later she would have to talk to Matthew about that. The problem, though, was that people often misunderstood a mention of space, and interpreted it as a suggestion to go away.

3. At Big Lou’s

Elspeth need not have worried; of course Matthew understood all about space within a marriage and it was for this reason that he had not suggested that Elspeth help in the gallery. It would be better, he thought, for each of them to have a separate career: ‘I’ve seen too many couples come unstuck because they were working together,’ he said to Angus Lordie. He made this remark without really thinking, and even as he said it he realised that he could not think of a single marriage in which that had happened. On the contrary – all the marriages of that sort that he had seen were rather successful.

‘Or perhaps not,’ he added lamely.

Angus had nodded wisely at Matthew’s original observation, and had not really heard the retraction. He knew very little about this as he had never been sufficiently stuck to become unstuck. It was a mystery to him how anybody lived with anybody else let alone worked with them too, and he could imagine nothing worse than having another person in his studio, painting her own paintings while he worked on his. He found that painting required complete silence – an artistic stillness – and the muse, fickle as she was at the best of times, would surely retreat in a huff if she had to contend with two painters in the same studio.

‘So I’m not going to ask Elspeth to help me in the gallery,’ Matthew went on. ‘I couldn’t bear it if we disagreed.’

‘That girl you had,’ said Angus. ‘Pat Macgregor. Did you disagree with her at all?’