‘You are a monster.’

‘I know, darling, I know.’

‘Help yourself to another glass and pour me one at the same time, would you?’ Edie told Rachel over the blues standards filling her print room with vocal smoke. She was busy pulling a print from a block she’d fitted to the vintage book press that stood at one end of the room’s central work bench.

Rachel topped up both their glasses and sipped a mouthful of wine. It was Saturday night and Edie had invited her down to the cottage for a drink. Rachel loved Edie’s print room, which held the shapes of such specific purpose and yet was entirely alien to anything she’d known before coming to Newton Dunbar. It was lit with the masses of candles that Edie liked to crowd around the edges of the room, the flamelight setting a mellow atmosphere enhanced by Edie’s love of the blues. The room had a detached feel to it, buffered from the real world by candlelight.

Edie turned the wheel of the press slowly until the top plate was clamped down as far as possible, then carefully wound it back before lifting the thin layer of felt blanket she used to protect the paper while in the device. Rachel leaned forward as Edie peeled the new print from the printing block, revealing a monochrome image of the lighthouse at sunset. It was an image that Rachel had seen before but she was always astonished by the level of detail and texture that the artist had accomplished with just two shades and a blade.

As Edie transferred the print to her drying rack, she said, ‘So, tell me. When are you going to put the journalist out of his misery?’

Rachel swallowed more wine and drummed the nails of her free hand on the table beside her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Toby,’ Edie said, as she began re-inking the block for another print. ‘It’s obvious that he fancies you. I assume he hasn’t asked you out, though? Or have you turned him down?’

‘He hasn’t asked me out.’

‘Would you say yes if he did?’

Rachel sipped more wine and shrugged.

‘Have you had any nookie at all since you’ve been here?’ Edie demanded.

Rachel narrowly avoided spitting wine all over Edie’s worktable. ‘Nookie?’

‘Or whatever the kids are calling it these days,’ the artist said airily. ‘Well? Have you?’

‘Edie!’

Edie leaned on the table with both hands, fixing Rachel with a serious eye. ‘You’re too young and too beautiful to be gathering dust the way you are,’ she said. ‘It’s not right.’

‘I’m fine as I am.’

Edie glowered at her for a moment, then shrugged and reached for her wine glass, taking a generous slug. Rachel regarded her friend: the sleek silver bob, slim build, black linen trousers, black rollneck, big silver jewellery. Rachel loved Edie’s perpetually chic look, loved her face, with her cheekbones that were still so sharp that they looked as if they could carve stone, her searing green eyes. She didn’t find it difficult to imagine Edie as she must have been in her twenties, as hip as all hell and stunning with it. How did one develop such poise and self-possession? Rachel had never mastered it and was forever in awe of women who had.