The first time Richard set eyes on her he wondered why she wasn’t doing her nails in the master bedroom of a thirty-berth yacht in the Persian Gulf, or bawling out her greeters as she stepped from the scrapertop helipad, late for her little lunch with B.J. or Leon or Whitney. More than this (because her face was artistic, unhackneyed, it was original), he could see her on the parapet of the Spanish castle, long emplaced as mistress-muse of the smocked and popeyed iconeer … All these impressions were strongly and strangely reinforced the first time he went to bed with her, which in fact took some doing. But there she sat, unregarded, behind a desk, selling postcards and catalogues in a black-timbered Nottingham museum, and behind her, through the glass, a patch of walled garden with the sun squinting at it after the rain, and a lone crow on the grass flexing its shoulders and straightening its sooty zootsuit. The world had not found out about her.  How come? Because Richard knew it couldn’t just be him. This was genetic celebrity, which had an audience in and an essential value. In other times and climes her family would have kept her in a locked room and held an auction on her sixteenth birthday. Leaning forward at her desk, counting money and sighing without weariness, she was ten years further on into womanhood – and the word, the phonecalls and faxes, still had time to go out to the planet’s playboys, all of them, from the pub spiv with his white-lipped salacities, up past the jodhpurred joked in his jeep, and right the way through to the kind of Opec kleptocrat who blew half his GNP on his own Johnson. Richard felt the ignoble excitement of a Sotherby’s smoothiebiy buying a Titian from a tinker. He was thirty, and Oxonian, and still handsome. He lived in London: the capital itself. He had a notorious girlfriend – the powerful Dominique-Louise. He was a freshly published novelist. But his knees were the knees seen through that bendy leaded window, seen by that brute of a crow, which was watching him and harshly purring.

He bought his seventh postcard and second catalogue and said, ‘Do you like Lawrence?’ And she looked up at him with eyes so great and clean that they were obliged to include some vapidity, some provincial vapidity, because there was room in there for everything. Gina was no English rose, dead the next day. This was sub-soil: Celt-Iberian, Northern-swarthy, gypsyish. Her eyes were set in dark loops of shadow, like badger, burglar, brawler, dramatically bruised by some internal suffusion (embarrassment always deepened these shadows); her nose was a Caligulan quarter-circle; he mouth was lean – not wide, not full.