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and she risked them being twisted beyond recovery, so blazingly did she demand justice. Many of her paintings were famously violent, so much so that critics had a hard time believing that a woman had painted them, but I had chosen this one because Artemisia had used her own face as her model.
    She was twenty-one when she made the picture, unwillingly married off to a third-rate court painter who sponged off her talent, but she showed herself, I thought, as she wanted to be, unashamed, her rather plain face serene, holding a compass, the symbol of her own determination. I will choose, the picture said to me, I will choose. Like all teenagers when they fall in love, I had been convinced that nobody understood Artemisia like I did. The object might have been unconventional, but the feeling was just the same. We were so alike, she and I. For sure, if she hadn’t died in the seventeenth century, we could have been Best Friends Forever.
    It was Artemisia who got me the job. That interview was the only time that Rupert ever saw me, that is, saw a person rather than a negligible presence. But even then, what he saw was a perfect, clever dogsbody who would do his grunt work and never complain. Now, leaning dry-eyed against a suburban wall, I felt a little skein of love twisting back towards my sixteen-year-old self, standing there in the Casa Buonarroti with her earnest book bag and her terrible clothes, wishing I could appear like a ghost from the future and tell her that everything was going to be alright. Because it would. I wasn’t going to go to the police. Rupert would fire me as soon as they’d taken my statement. No. I could take this, I could make it alright.

5
    Getting home that evening my nerves were fizzing, and I told myself that after Colonel Morris I deserved a bit of a party. I texted Lawrence to see if there was anything going on at his place that night. Lawrence was an acquaintance from my early days in London: rich, dubious and placidly addicted to heroin. I’d got to know him around the scene, which like all special-interest hobbies is a pretty small world. Now he organised more private affairs at his home in Belgravia and suggested I swing by the Square about eleven.
    Lawrence’s parties supposedly cost £150, but I knew he’d let me in for nothing. I unlocked my bedroom door and let my head fall back against the silk kimono hanging there, breathing in the scent of clean linen and geranium oil from my little ceramic burner. I looked at my books, my neatly made bed, the Balinese-print shawl hung over the foul Venetian blind, and I couldn’t stand the sight of any of it. All cheap, all so pathetically optimistic. Not even the folded promise of the beautiful clothes in the hunchbacked melamine wardrobe could soothe me. I rustled through my things, trying to work out how I felt. Nothing too aggressive. Underneath, I needed to be soft, feminine; on top I would be the cat who walked by herself. I chose coffee-coloured Brazilian-cut lace shorts and a matching bra. Over that I slipped on loose combats, a black tee and Converse. I’d change into heels when I got there – I could afford a cab these days, but I wanted to move, to clear my lungs of the lingering spores of the Colonel’s blanket. I took a luxurious time making up my face to make it look as though I hadn’t made up my face and walked over to Belgravia.
    The still-white stuccoed streets seemed wrapped in secrets. It was always so calm here; whatever sins were concealed behind those plutocratic porticoes were safely swaddled by money. Lawrence was leaning in the doorway of 33 Chester Square, smoking, as I approached. Probably grabbing some peace from the commune of rackety Soho exiles which inhabited his attic, sponging and drinking and fancying themselves artists: in theory the fee for the parties kept them in smack and vinyl. I’d sometimes thought of asking for a room myself, to save the rent, but the atmosphere was too messy; it would distract me