One day, presented with the reliable fruit scone, Jacqueline snaps, ‘I’ve filled my boots with those things.’

‘You don’t like the recipe?’

‘It’s not the recipe, it’s the sameness. Same shape, same texture, same seven bloody sultanas in every one. Do you count them or what?’

‘I’ll put it away for later.’

‘Feed it to the birds. I told you, I’ve lost my taste.’

And what does Patience do? She feeds it to the birds! Jacqueline has to watch her out there in the little back garden, poking broken scones into the bird-feeder, scattering the rest of them on the ground: so much food that the finches can’t contain themselves but come fluttering in and dart around Patience’s feet. Or is it that Patience’s feet aren’t feet to them, don’t register as living things, but as the base of the folded washing line, or tyres on a car in the road?

Claire would not have fed the scones to the birds. She would have known to put them away for later.

Pieter Claesz’s Covered Table with Pie depicts an elaborate cornucopia of fruits, nuts, olives, sliced bread and sliced lemons, a cut-open pie, and a large basket overflowing with grapes. The grapes and the olives and the goblet of white wine gleam wetly like the surface of an eye.

‘Isn’t it incredible?’ Jerome says. ‘There’s so much written about this painting already. I don’t know what I was thinking. Like, I’ve been reading Arthur Goldberg again. Have you ever read any Goldberg? His criticism is outstanding. The things he can make a painting do!’

‘See, to me, that’s the wrong way around.’

‘Oh,’ Jerome says, ‘you’re a Romantic. You gotta get over that.’

They walk through the empty galleries, past rows of imposing oils, and he talks about the importance of mastering one’s texts – he often calls paintings ‘texts’. He begins to tell her about a PhD student he supervises, ‘this poor girl’, who hasn’t realised what a scam Hallabassee is, who works so many part-time service jobs to pay her tuition fees that she can’t get a grip on Claesz; and then he tells her about another student he is meant to supervise next year, a young man, barely twenty-two, who is determined to write about anatomical aberrations in ‘Andrea del Sarto’ and Rob Liefeld’s Captain America. When Claire pulls a face at this, Jerome says, ‘I know, right? Who’s interested in Browning?’

They sit on a bench in a hall full of Hals, groups of men in cavalier costumes gathered around banqueting tables, making merry, all their heads at different angles, as if they’re each inclining to a different voice.

‘I nearly did a PhD,’ she says.

‘Oh yeah?’ Grease shines on Jerome’s upper lip.

‘I wanted to write about Mary Shelley. Not Frankenstein, a different book. Mathilda. You won’t have read it. Nobody’s ever heard of it. It wasn’t published in her lifetime. She sent it home to England, and it just disappeared. It turned up later, in the 1950s.’