This sounded almost permissive enough to let me risk retrieving the Las Vegas book, but I didn’t want to attract any of her suppressed displeasure. Instead I took the surrealist volume upstairs, where I saw my aunt had left the studio door open. Activity beyond the window caught my eye, and I tiptoed across the unlit room to look. Surely the fluid movement in the dark beneath the trees belonged to rain, yet for a moment I thought I was seeing a figure faintly outlined by a glow. It reminded me of how Abel had looked on his way to the gate. Before I could focus on the shape, it disappeared among the trees. As I strained to locate it the dimness appeared to take on more substance and loom at me, not just beyond the window. I’d forgotten the impression I’d once had of faces at my back, but now they felt imminent again, hovering before they descended or swelled towards me. I could easily have thought not all the whispers in the studio came from rain. When I twisted around I saw no intruders, and told myself the faces lying in wait in the dark around me were on canvases, every one. I was making fast for the lit doorway when my mother called “Patrick, are you in your room?”

“I am now,” I shouted, and sneaked across the landing to slam the door.

I was about to lie on the bed with the book when I heard the door of the front room shut beneath me. For a minute or more there was silence, no doubt while my aunt and my parents sat down and perhaps while they gazed at one another, and then my mother said “What’s been going on while Patrick was here, Thelma?”

I could only just make out her words. If she hadn’t brought me into it I mightn’t have eavesdropped, but I felt she’d given me the excuse if not the right. I lay on the floor, pressing my ear against the carpet just in time to hear my aunt’s response. “Nothing he knows about, Astrid.”

“He does now.”

“I really don’t think you can blame me for that. You did rather make an issue out of it in front of him.”

“There’d have been no issue if it weren’t for your behaviour, and please don’t tell me Patrick wasn’t aware of that.”

“I don’t believe he even knew Abel was here till you all met him.”

Should I have known? Had I heard him in the studio one night when my aunt and uncle were still together? I thought my aunt’s contention might placate my mother, but it seemed to displease her all the more. “He’s your latest secret, is he? How long were you seeing him before Neville knew about him?”

“Not too long. At first he thought Abel was my model.”