‘You’d enjoy it, Joe,’ she enthused one evening as she and Harry Lafeyre were having dinner with Joe and Maria at Harry’s club, the United Services, on St Stephen’s Green. ‘If you’ve worked only in pencil or charcoal, you should try out your hand with watercolours. I’ll help you.’

‘All I did as a boy every day was to draw what I saw,’ Swallow had explained. ‘I wanted to record things, reduce them if you like, to images on paper. I’ve always done that. Even still, I want to frame the reality that I see within . . . some sort of medium of my own.’

‘Hmmph,’ Lafeyre had grumbled, forking sole bonne femme into his mouth. ‘Sounds as if you should have been a photographic technician. Cameras are very good at that sort of thing; far better than people scratching away with pencils. Painters can lie. Flatter to deceive. But the camera doesn’t lie.’

Lily rolled her eyes.

‘Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m going to marry a complete philistine.’

Despite being more than a year into the course, he felt that he had learned only of his limitations. Lily was a good teacher, patient and tolerant, but even getting him to understand primary colours was a challenge. He had thought initially that using watercolours looked easy, but he learned quickly that if one got something wrong it almost always required a completely fresh start. Moreover, there were some talented people in the class whose work was so superior to his efforts that he sometimes felt embarrassed.

‘Good afternoon, Joe.’

Catherine Greenberg greeted him as she set up her easel next to his in the art room. She was one of those talents. Catherine could infuse a still-life—a silver bowl with fruit or a lamp draped in satin—with colour and vitality that seemed to give it an existence beyond its mundane reality.

It was in the blood, Swallow reckoned. Catherine’s father, Ephram, operated one of Dublin’s finest dealerships in objets d’art and antiques from his premises in Capel Street. Unusually among the Jewish community, Catherine had not married, and at thirty or so she was was probably considered beyond marriageable age among her own people. She was now in the business as a partner with her father. As well as an aesthete and an artist, Swallow knew her to be a competent businesswoman.

He had known the Greenbergs, as he knew all of the Jewish community around Capel Street, from his days as a constable on the beat from the D-Division’s Bridewell Station. Miriam Greenberg, Catherine’s mother, would give him poppy-seed bread and strong coffee when he would slip into the Greenbergs’ kitchen off his beat. She had died in a local influenza outbreak ten years ago. Catherine had inherited her mother’s dark good looks, deep eyes, and a slight tendency to plumpness.