I regretted not swimming in the sea at Byrne Hall, and I developed a fantasy in which I left the wedding party and escaped down to the beach with the barefooted man. Perhaps that sounds strange, given it was the place where my sister had died. But the sea was the element that brought me closest to Stella—as close as I could ever hope to get—and it still made me happy because it had once made us both happy. In my dream the man and I slipped our clothes off in the darkness, walked into the sea and swam for miles, until there were no sounds except for our own hard breathing and the lap of water on skin. When we looked back, the garden had become a dusting of fairy lights on the horizon and the house itself a ghostly bride, hovering in the night sky.

On Friday evening I was forced to break my routine because I’d arranged to meet Dad after work and walk with him to the Wingate Gallery for the opening of the Renaissance drawings exhibition. Heat wave or no heat wave, there was no getting out of it—not with Tom in charge of the curation. Tom would have seen right through my excuses if I’d been tactless enough to make them, and anyway, Dad had to go because he was doing a review for his column in the London Globe.

So there I stood in the expensive cool of Room Two, a week on from my cousin’s wedding, pretending to appreciate a Madonna and child in red chalk and trying not to look aloof. I used to love exhibition openings like this; it used to be fun when Stella was alive. Trays of white wine and smoked salmon tartlets were doing the rounds, so I took a glass.

I was conscious of my father hard at work on the other side of the gallery, going from picture to picture and scrawling notes all over his catalogue. I can’t say I was conscious of much else. The creak of polished floorboards, the burble of cultured conversation, the tinkling trays of glasses—it was all just background to my thoughts, and I might as well have been loitering outside on the street, or lying in bed with my music on, or backstroking up and down a lane in the pool. I couldn’t even focus on the pictures, drifting against the dark-red walls in their own orbs of light. It was as if there was a pane of glass between me and the world, which grew foggier with every outward breath. In and among the chatterers, there were people to whom the drawings meant something—you could tell by the way they stood and stared—and I wished I were one of them.

I opened the catalogue again and flipped through, searching for Tom’s essay. The Wingate always produced quality catalogues for their exhibitions, but even in my distracted state I recognised this one as a beauty, with its thick cover and glossy white pages, its razor-sharp reproductions of every picture, and its copious notes. I found Tom’s piece at the front. “Raphael and the Art of Pity” it was titled, in large, brick-red italics. “An introduction by Assistant Curator Thomas Gardiner.” At the end of the article there was a little mug shot of him looking faintly startled in his broken glasses.