Dean was the youngest. Claire was in the middle. Callum, the crown prince, had lived four years before his sister came along, with their mother all to himself. He was not spoilt in any obvious way. His demands were infrequent and modest: that he could be allowed to stay up to watch The Crystal Maze; that he not have to play sports any more. Their father thought there was something maladapted about him. Look at those shoulders: he was born for rugby. He’d got a strategic mind. Why on earth did he want to hide in his bedroom painting figurines?

Claire assumed the intermediary position on this. She spent Saturdays at her friends’ houses, trying on their clothes, envying and fancying their sportive brothers, and even, sometimes, their dads. But on Sunday afternoons she stayed at home and sprawled on her stomach on the tough grey carpet of Callum’s room, playing with the figures he had sanded, primed and painted so elaborately, with such steady-handed care, then placed among the armies that covered his flocked polystyrene hills. Each figure stood upon a plastic base the size of a 1p coin, and Callum had glued a circle of felt to every one.

Claire had written her final dissertation on the subject of felt. The choice had been a panicked one, made on the morning of the title deadline; but later it had come to seem preternaturally wise, allowing her to dwell on the remembered pleasures of those fuzzy-felt bases clinging to the scabrous landscape, and the stuffed decoy birds of prey wired to her parents’ damson trees, which had seemed so much more covetable for being out of reach.

After university she found bar work and hunted for graduate jobs in the day, application after application, none of which got her anywhere, until a girl she knew hooked her up with a small gallery in need of an intern. It sold, predominantly, textiles: silk wall hangings, feathered dreamcatchery assemblages that wafted in the draft when you opened the door. A little bell rang; the owner came forth, a stout, bouffant-haired woman named Andrea, who wore the collars of her shirts popped up, and permitted Claire to sleep on a roll-away bed in the storage room until she could find a real place to live. It was meant to be her start in curation, but she soon discovered that she was there primarily to dust and pour wine, both things she could already do. Andrea’s bourgeois friends, who formed the gallery’s only customer base, wanted their art to match their curtains. Sometimes, if she could not sleep, she would come down into the exhibition space, pour herself a glass, and pull loose threads from the works’ raw edges, half-hoping to get caught.