She worked on, absorbed, humming beneath her breath, until Daisy burst in, face pink, hair flying. She gabbled, ‘Scarlett and Octavia have been excluded for the rest of the week and I’m moving into the other art class where Zuzanna and Niall are.’

And Laurel fell back to earth realising, in quick succession, that it was almost four o’clock, she hadn’t eaten lunch and she was starving. In Chiswick, she would have worked on into the evening if she’d felt like it with just a few rueful texts from Alex about eating alone to contend with. For an instant she felt like snapping, ‘What the hell, Daisy! I’m working.’

But … this absence of ceremony, lack of privacy, came with the territory of living and working here. With family.

Daisy was obviously waiting for the big news to be exclaimed over. Laying down her brush, Laurel gave her niece her full attention. ‘Wow, that was a prompt result. How do you feel about it?’

Daisy stooped and gave Laurel a huge hug, her ponytail dangling perilously close to the paint palette. ‘So relieved. Thank you, Auntie Laurel. You’ve made everything right.’ Then Daisy’s face crumpled and she burst into noisy tears. ‘S-sorry, I am relieved, honest. It’s just—’

‘Relief,’ Laurel finished for her. All irritation at being interrupted forgotten, she cuddled Daisy until the tears dried. Then she let the soft, adolescent body pull away, saying, ‘You’d better stay for a bit so Rea doesn’t see your red eyes.’ She texted her sister: Daisy in studio with me xx

She looked up to see Daisy examining Laurel’s sketchpad. ‘You’re so cool,’ she breathed. ‘Figure drawing’s well hard.’

‘It takes practice,’ Laurel agreed. She turned to a fresh sheet on her pad and began going over figure drawing technique, starting with a vertical line divided into eight equal segments.

‘I like to begin with the two parts of the torso but it might be easier to think first of the head. We measure all the body in terms of the head. See, shoulders are two head-heights wide.’ She dashed in a just-off-horizontal line. ‘The crotch comes at the halfway point.’ Another line. ‘Knees come around the top of the second segment. Decide where the person’s looking and find the centre line of the face, centre of the body, so we know where the rib cage arch is.’ Swiftly, a stick person appeared on her paper, leaning one elbow on something, head and shoulders slightly cocked towards the dancing girl. ‘I like to know which is the supporting leg and get it under the centre.’ As Laurel indicated knees, hands and feet with ovals, and sketched in a square jaw and broad chest, she realised she was drawing a man who was watching the dancing woman. His body language was relaxed but focused.