It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

He was entrenched in life-study portraiture and he made it provocative. ‘It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious,’ he said.

She was mesmerised by his focused intent, the combination of a strict work ethic with an unstructured moral code. While his subject was before him, they were all-important. ‘The aura given out by a person or an object is as much a part of them as their flesh,’ he once wrote. ‘The effect they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and a light bulb.’

Once Sophie had started an affair with Lucian, she too quickly realised that he was incapable of sticking to one sexual partner. ‘I was intensely involved but aware that other people were involved too. You don’t know things and just have to work them out. You’re not quite sure what’s going on. When Lucian was out of the room I would look at the paintings turned against the wall and see a bit more of someone’s breast. It would make me terribly jealous. He gave a lot of attention when you were there with him, but when you weren’t then you knew there was a whole other life happening. That was tough,’ she said.

Annie identified with him, almost obsessively. ‘We looked alike. We even sounded alike in the way he slightly rolled his Rs in words like “free” or “restaurant”. And I loved his assertions… how he would say, “I take bribes but they never influence my judgement: that’s true incorruptibility.” I was one hundred per cent part of him.

It was something new to apply this degree of attention to his material self. His sense of where he was migrated from his head to his body, from perception to proprioception. There was a daily round of meals, exercises and readings to work on. The perfectibility of habit, and the habit of perfection.