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‘True.’ I pictured the immaculate flat. Everything in its place and neutral colours all chosen to soothe.

He’d taken so much time to make sure there was nothing there that would trigger me.

I was such a mess when I moved in with him.

My thesis was due, the press were hounding my father and my uncle, and it was all my fault.

I cracked under the pressure and Paul helped me.

He made sure nothing distressed me while I recovered from my breakdown.

No social media, no busy places and few responsibilities.

He even helped me find the job I love. As Dad always said, love is more about what you do than what you say. Paul was always looking out for me.

The phone beeped.

‘Look, that’s Louis. I need to take the call,’ Paul said. ‘Chat tomorrow. Love you.’

The line went dead. That was not the conversation I’d wanted or hoped for. There was no sense in dwelling on it, though, for there was too much to do.

I scrolled through my emails and found one from Tash’s father, Jack Thomas, who was Dad’s solicitor.

In it he laid out the key steps to sorting probate and the big-picture stuff.

Dad had left me a ten per cent share of the business, adding to the four per cent my grandfather had left me and the previous ten Dad had given me when Stephen had sold it to him to fund the purchase of his beloved cottage on the cliffs.

Dad’s remaining shares would go to Mum along with everything else bar a small Hepworth sculpture.

I’d been with him when he’d bought it. It didn’t feel real that he was gone, yet the evidence was all around me.

* * *

It was near midnight when I had finally convinced my mother she needed to sleep, and so did I. Time disappeared helping her with things, so I hadn’t even glanced at the file on Kernow and Sykes.

I opened the folder and found Dad’s notes. God, how I missed him, but I focused on the task at hand. It wasn’t for me that I was doing this; it wasn’t even for him. It was for Mum. These weeks since Dad died had shown me how bad things were. She needed help, and help wasn’t cheap.

Bathsheba Kernow, painter, born 1914, died December 2018

Vivian Sykes, sculptor, born 1920, died December 2018

I paused, struck by them dying in the same month. Which one had died first?

Harbour House, Newlyn

Inventory, value for probate, and sell by January 2020

January 2020 was struck through and a series of further dates added and deleted. The latest was written in my uncle’s sharp script.

Ordered by the court to be completed no later than June 2022

It was now the end of March. Not much time.

I turned the page and saw that he had added another note.

No item of furniture is worth more than a hundred pounds. All to be included in a general sale. I doubt the art, books or papers are worth a sale in their own right, but to be included in a sale of Cornish artists’ works.

On a separate notepad I began a list of questions.

Why had the sale been delayed?

What prices had been achieved for their previous works?

What schools or universities might be interested in collections of artists’ papers if any were discovered?

A search of the sale of artists’ papers revealed disappointing results unless they were well known.

These two were not. Hardly any of their work had sold in years.

That could be down to their ages. Kernow was one hundred and four when she died, and Sykes was no spring chicken at ninety-eight.

As both women had lived in Cornwall, maybe Falmouth University might want them.

Of course, I was getting ahead of myself.

I hadn’t been to the premises. How long had they lived at Harbour House?

I closed my eyes and in my mind travelled the short distance along the coast from Penzance, through Newlyn and on towards Mousehole.

The house sat just off the road, and I’d always admired its Georgian bones, with a garden that presented itself to the roadside.

It had the look of being uncared for at first glance, but explosions of colour shouted careful planting.

Opening my eyes, I saw my father’s study, which was a bit chaotic.

It was so him, and had been me too, but now, at the age of thirty, I’d learned my lesson.

Everything in my life had a place, and God help me if it was even the smallest bit askew.

Untidiness did my head in. I straightened the pens on Dad’s desk.

As I did with every artist I researched in my job for the television programme Fake or Fabulous , I typed Kernow’s name into the search engine to see what, if anything, was known about her and her work.

Google always threw up the most obvious and the most sponsored, but sometimes it also gave me an idea of what sort of job was in front of me.

Both women had achieved some degree of success, but I suspected not anything like they deserved.

Female artist after female artist had been seen through the lens of who had taught them, who their lovers had been and who their family were.

I’d hoped by this point in my life to have made some impact on this imbalance, but I hadn’t. Maybe I could with these two.

Kernow had a Wiki page, but my jaw clenched as I read it.

Bathsheba Kernow , daughter of painter Francis Kernow and his wife Rebecca, née Arthur, was born in St Ives in 1914 just before her father served in the First World War.

Francis Kernow’s experiences on the battlefield changed his style of painting.

Pre-war he had been influenced by the nearby Newlyn school, but his style became less classical post-war.

He had major exhibitions in London, Paris and New York and was part of the St Ives school.

He is well known for his encouragement of many of the younger artists like Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon, helping them to forge their more modern approaches.

‘Fascinating, but what about Bathsheba?’ I muttered.

Bathsheba Kernow trained with her father, then, after travel in Europe, studied at the Slade in 1935, working with Derek Thompson, who became renowned for his abstract work.

I slapped my hands on the desk. ‘Bloody hell, does it never end?’ I said aloud.

It was the same story I saw over and over again in my studies of women artists.

The same pattern, the repeated telling of the men who’d fathered, taught or even loved them.

Little or nothing of the artist themselves. It was simply so wrong.

It was a sad fact that until the twentieth century, if a woman hadn’t been born into an artistic family, she stood little chance of becoming an artist. Women were denied so many opportunities that men took for granted, like life drawing.

It was thought improper for a woman to draw nudes.

That was why Dame Laura Knight’s 1913 self-portrait with Ella Naper was groundbreaking.

She had put herself in the painting with a nude, and on a large scale.

I remembered my father explaining all this to me on a trip to the National Portrait Gallery.

It had begun my passion for putting women back into the history of art and not simply researching who their families were or who had taught them.

Of course, all that work sat in the box in the bedroom, not forgotten but not good enough.

But I still championed women artists in a small way in weekly posts to Instagram, the one social media I allowed myself.

In each post I would highlight one artist and her work.

This I could do. It didn’t take convincing arguments, simply pictures of their art and some facts.

It didn’t change the world, but it highlighted the lives of female artists one square on the grid at a time.

Doing this for so many years had gained me a large number of followers.

But I hadn’t had the heart to post since Dad died. I must return to it.

I touched the blurry photo of Kernow on the screen.

She appeared out of focus, wind-blown, with her long hair wrapped about her neck and face.

‘Bathsheba Kernow, if I do nothing else in this project, I will make sure that when we sell your work, we will sing your praises and not those of your father or your teachers.’

The biography of Vivian Sykes was no better. It spoke of her father and brothers and the men who’d taught her, with one mention of her sister, also a sculptor. Every time I thought the world had moved forward and women could be looked at in their own right, I was proved wrong.

I stood and closed my laptop. Looking at Wiki had been a bad idea.

Sadly, I doubted the art market press would be any better.

I clenched my hands, accepting that to maximise the publicity and possible value of the work for the sale, some of these facts about the women’s families and teachers would increase interest. But I was determined to find out more about the artists themselves to make them shine in their own right.

The first step would be to discover more about their deaths, details that should be readily available.