“It’s true, you know. See these little crosses. Well, if you look at them long enough, they make a picture of a woman in the bath.”

“Do you think so?” said Marie’s father, who was now really interested. “A woman in the bath … really?”

He started turning the book round and round.

“Yes! Look, you can see the arms and the neck clearly here, and there are the boo— you know, the whatsits … the things for feeding babies… There’s the edge of the bath… You can even see the soap… See? It’s as clear as anything!”

All three of them looked at me as though I was some sort of weird insect.

“What about the title?” asked Marie.

“The title? What title?”

“Here, look: Monochrome Factory.”

I sighed. I wasn’t going to make an issue about the word “monochrome”, because vocabulary like that is just way out of reach.

“It’s only a very small title. And anyway a title doesn’t mean much. Think of The Three Musketeers, well, there were four of them! So, yeah. And that’s not even modern art. So it goes to show, with what’s produced these days, nobody’s going to give a stuff about titles…”

“Mind you, he’s got a point,” said Marie’s mother. “It’s the same sort of thing with music. In the old days you used to get the ‘Seventh Symphony’, which tells you exactly what it means: after the Sixth and before the Eighth. Whereas nowadays…”

Encouraged by this, I thought I’d throw in a comparison between modern painting and the Asterix books, but it was obvious they hadn’t read any of them, even if they did try to cover it up.

The conversation rolled on pleasantly for a while. My confidence kept growing. I felt good and I began to see that Panhard cars might not be the only interesting things in the world. It went a bit pear-shaped in the end because I lacked relevant facts. Marie’s father suddenly asked me, “Do you like Pollock?”

Pollock – why was he talking about fish? At first, I wondered whether he was making fun of me because of my limitations, but I often get that impression, so maybe not… Then I came to the conclusion that he must have a second job as a fishmonger. Being the ear of an auction perhaps didn’t bring enough in, financially speaking.

As I hesitated, he told me that the previous week he’d sold a whole load of Pollocks and he’d felt sickened by it. I couldn’t see why: it wasn’t as though he’d had to eat them.

“Can you believe it, one went to Berlin for three million.”

A pollock for three million! Was that some kind of a boast?

“Was it a whopper?” I asked tentatively.

It seemed a ridiculous price. Marie was frowning. She appeared to be mesmerized. And then all of a sudden she burst out laughing. I wiped my sleeve across my moustache, just in case…