Jenny picks at her food and in the end I tell her not to bother with it at all, that she’s putting us all off. The kids don’t seem that perturbed that there is more pasta on the menu. I tell Jenny that I like the dress that she is wearing. It’s a coral pink and it’s a colour that brings out her sallow skin. I recall purchasing it for her in Rome in a small boutique. It wasn’t a particularly expensive place and the attention that the girl in the shop gave us seemed well at odds with the amount that we were going to spend. Perhaps kindness is more peculiar to a city that seems to be filled with warmth and beauty. Jenny seems pleased that I have mentioned the dress and this is all it takes, it seems, for her to come back to me. Joey gets ice cream from the freezer and Maeve brings over a cake that she has made while I have been out running.

Later on when Jenny leaves to meet Simon I go to her desk. I can hear the shrieks of laughter from Mikey and Joey as they mess about in their room. I can hear Maeve asking them to keep it down, that she’s trying to sleep, and then I hear Maeve laughing. Their humour is infectious. I sit at Jenny’s desk and I study a book that she likes on David Hockney. There is a splodge of oil on the cover of the book. An opened bottle of linseed oil is close to the wooden sculpture of a turnstone that she has been working on for ages, as if she has recently added one more coat to protect the delicacy of the wood. Beside the turnstone is a sketch of the Brother from the monastery close to the beach. The Brother is on his knees, praying, and he is concentrating on the sea. He is oblivious to the fact that he is being watched. Jenny has created an intimate scene, a sense of a religious privacy. We know very little about this religious order other than the fact that they dress in long white garments and they appear to be happy but moderately so. And it is this lack of knowledge that is so intriguing.