“Honestly, Cory . . .” I wanted to be cross, but I found myself laughing instead. “Don’t take those poems seriously. I know they sound febrile, but I wrote them a long time ago. Tom isn’t—wasn’t . . .”

Cory was watching me, waiting; I wasn’t used to such interest and encouragement when I talked. I twisted my glass by the stem, mesmerised by the way the candlelight glanced off the liquid: now flashing, now glowing, now fading to nothing.

“I was a little bit in love with Tom once,” I confessed. “Stella and I both had a thing for him when we were in our teens. He’s about five years older than me, and we’d known him since we were small, but he got married and his wife left him after only a few months, and it made him seem so, I don’t know . . .”

I petered out. The whole thing was dark and complicated all those years ago, when Dad let Tom sleep on our sofa and we lay awake listening to the murmur of voices downstairs. Tom on the phone, Tom talking to Dad, Tom talking to himself. More than once, we heard him cry. It seemed silly now to have desired him so much, just because someone else had made him suffer. It was adolescent.

“Anyway, let’s not talk about it.” I sat up straight and pushed my hair off my face. “It seems so long ago. He’s just Tom again now.”

Cory rose to his feet, and my imagination quailed for a moment. He looked overly tall when he was standing up—his shadow heightened the effect by quivering up the walls and looming over the ceiling—but he was only crossing the room to raise the blind and open the window. The sash rattled up and the night breathed in on us, damp, cool, and earthy. Some of the candles shivered and went out. The storm had passed, but the dripping in the woods sounded like fresh rainfall, and water was spattering from the gutters and smacking onto the gravel down below. The hairs stood up on my arms with a pleasurable chill, and Cory stretched his arms as if he’d just woken up.

“Can I draw you?”

Before I’d even answered, he was upturning piles of papers and boards, flipping through sketchbooks and folders, rummaging for pencils.

“Only if you show me some of your old pictures.”

He froze.

“You did promise. You said if I showed you my poems—”

“Yes. So I did.”

He dusted his hands uneasily down his shirt and glanced round the room. There were dozens of canvases on every side—some in frames, all with their faces turned coyly to the wall—but he paid them no attention.

“Wait a moment,” he said, “let me think . . .”

I got to my feet as he turned a few reluctant pages in one of the smaller sketchbooks, and approached one of the large canvases. I only touched the edge of it with my fingertips—I wasn’t going to turn it round without his say-so—but he grabbed my wrist.