He was in jeans and a paint-spattered T-shirt. There was paint all over it. Green and blue from wiping his hands or cleaning brushes, and red, splashed like a Jackson Pollock on the white cotton. She couldn’t see if the paint was wet or dry.

‘Have you been painting?’ she said, happy at the thought and holding his present behind her back.

‘No.’ He sounded angry she would ask. ‘I haven’t been painting, I’ve been at work. I just wanted to get out of that suit. How can I come home and paint, after what I do all day?’

‘Oh. OK,’ she said. ‘How was it?’

‘My day? It was the normal shit. Yours?’

‘Mine was – interesting,’ said Bea. She told him about the girl in the Oxfam shop, and about her clients. ‘I’ve got a present for you.’

She gave him the Italian leather holdall.

‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, babe.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘Why do I always end up apologising?’

‘You don’t need to. It’s just hand luggage.’

‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘Hand luggage. But we never go anywhere.’

‘We might.’

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Bea.

Bea and Dan had met at the Bussey Building in Peckham on a warm evening in June, in 2016. She was out for a club night with her girls, going up the crowded concrete stairwell, when she saw the metal doors to one of the galleries were propped open, and the small groups of people standing awkwardly inside. It felt mean to walk past as if it were a market stall.

‘Let’s have a look,’ she said to her friends.

She saw Dan the moment they walked in. She tried not to stare. She hated how obvious it was to notice the most attractive man in the room, but she couldn’t help it; he was noticeable. He was standing with his hands in his pockets looking at the floor, not demonstrating himself like beautiful people usually did. He seemed uneasy, and she wondered why.

Bea was right, Dan had been uneasy, more nervous than he’d been at his graduation show, a few weeks before. The night was showcasing a selection of that year’s graduate pieces on the theme of ‘Father’. His work was hanging on a public wall – not any wall – here. He had lived round the corner from the Bussey his whole life. It had been the first place outside the Tate that he’d seen art, and the first time he’d glimpsed it as a possible life, not for the imaginary Them but for him; not just as personal catharsis but a potential future. He’d also just started sleeping with his tutor, and now her husband and child had come along to the party for the show. She hadn’t even told Dan she was married. Caught between her and the other students, who were all younger than he was and seemed so confident of their talent, he found himself staring at the floor. There were painfully bright strip lights hanging from the high-up ceiling, and the art was glaring from plasterboard, eight feet high, both aggressive and vulnerable, waiting to be judged. He saw the five girls stop at his painting with their arms crossed. Despite his nerves, partly just to get away from his tutor’s husband, he approached them.