Cory was drawing when I woke. It was only a small watercolour sketch, and rather than standing at the easel he was sitting cross-legged near my pillow with the board across his knees. He’d sat like that to draw me on our first evening, before I’d kissed him; before I knew I was going to stay.

“What are you going to call it when it’s finished?” I croaked. “Freya with a Snotty Cold?”

He put the board to one side and got to his feet

“I thought of calling it The Convalescent,” he said. “They don’t all have to have Freya in the title.”

I had an upside-down view of his drawing as it lay on the floor. The girl in the bed was colourless and fragile; she could have been drawn by one of those Victorian artists with an avowed interest in angelic females and a sublimated interest in sex and death. You wouldn’t know that my upper lip was raw and my nostrils dripping.

I pulled the covers over my chin. Cory picked my clothes up and began folding them—pulling the cardigan sleeves outside-in, shaking the jeans straight, stroking the creases out of my shirt.

“Why are they all damp?” he wanted to know. “Have you been outside this morning?”

“Only into the garden.”

I blew my nose, hiding my face in the rough paper towel that I was using for a tissue. Cory kept reams of the stuff for blotting paint.

“I thought we’d agreed . . .”

“What?”

He shrugged.

“What did we agree? That I’m not allowed out on my own?”

He shrugged again and turned away.

“Well, frankly it was quite stupid,” he said without any tenderness, and the rain pattered against the window as if to back him up. “No wonder you feel rough.”

I think that watercolour—The Convalescent—was the only portrait Cory ever failed to complete. He was usually a stickler for finishing what he’d started.

He spent the rest of the morning downstairs—painting his galleries Pamplona Red, I suppose—and in the afternoon he began bringing empty picture frames to the studio and dusting them with yellow cloths. I watched from under my eyelids, and if he ever glanced my way I pretended to be asleep. Sometimes I actually slept. There was a mist at the windows, and time never seemed to move between one doze and the next.

“Freya.”

Tom’s voice was whispery in my dream, and when I opened my eyes the room was a dim mingling of night and candlelight. It was Cory, not Tom, but I smiled in an effort to prolong the dream, and after a while he smiled back. I propped myself on my elbow and he wrapped my fingers round a mug.

“Drink this,” he said. “Brandy and hot water.”