He raised his hands. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t, I don’t know what you mean. Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?’

He opened the bottle, stood and walked around to refill her glass. ‘Darling, I’m sorry, don’t let’s row on our first day in our new home. We’re both tired and I – you know. My parents aren’t well off – I’m grateful to your parents, yes, but it just upsets me the way they treat me like I’m a loser. They don’t get me.’

‘It’s not that they don’t get you. You know that Dad’s a blunt what-you-see-is-what-you-get Northerner. He doesn’t get art.’

Jason knew Emily’s father had grown up on a council estate with his sick mother – his father had buggered off when he was four. He’d spent his childhood taking care of his mum, worked his way up, from doing a newspaper round to being a building labourer to the success he’d had as a property developer.

‘Tell me about it. I’ll never forget when I asked him if I could marry you, he looked me in the eye and told me he’d give me his approval the day I stopped pissing about painting pretty pictures and did a proper job, so I could look after his daughter.’

‘Well, that’s happening, isn’t it?’ she replied.

‘Do you believe it?’

‘Totally. I don’t just believe it, I know it! You are going to be massive, just keep the faith, keep believing in yourself the way I believe in you, my love.’

They stared into each other’s eyes.

‘Just remember last March eleventh.’

It was a date he would never forget for the rest of his life, no matter what happened subsequently. After several years of working in the attic of their tiny house, showing his work in a local gallery in Lewes, and being told that if he wanted to become a serious professional painter, he needed an exhibition, he had found the Northcote in London. The gallery had liked his work and had taken six pieces. They had sold four in the first month and then offered him a one-man show, and set a date of 11 March the following year. But they wanted twenty-two paintings.

For months he had worked furiously, painting landscapes, dogs and his trademark characters drinking in pubs. He financed himself, in between these, with commissions for mostly animal portraits. Four months before the exhibition, he had the twenty-two pieces complete but unframed. But it would need an investment of over four thousand pounds to pay the framer. His only asset was his drum kit – his one recreation away from painting had been as a jazz drummer. Refusing to accept Emily’s offer of asking her parents, he had sold it to pay for the frames.

On the night of the show the two of them had travelled to London by train. A bag of nerves, he had dressed smartly in a new velvet jacket, white shirt and chinos, and Emily was in a pretty dark dress. To save money on a taxi, they’d walked to the gallery from Victoria, which had taken far longer than they had thought, through the freezing night air.