‘Naow. After the way she mucked up Miss Troy’s picture, I didn’t want to have anything to do with her. It’s just too bad she’s got hers for keeps, but all the same I reckon she was a fair nark, that girl. Always slinging off about Aussie, she was. She’d been out there once with a Vordervill show, and I tipped it was a bum show because she was always shooting off her mouth about the way the Aussies don’t know a good thing when they see it. These pommies! She gave me the jitters. Just because I couldn’t talk big about my home and how swell my people were, and how we cut a lot of ice in Sydney, she treated me like dirt. I said to her one time, I said: “I reckon if Miss Troy thought I was good enough to come here, even if my old pop did keep a bottle store on Circular Quay, I reckon if she thought I was OK I’m good enough for you.” I went very, very crook at her after she did that to the picture. Miss Troy’s been all right to me. She’s been swell. Did you know she paid my way in the ship?’

‘Did she?’

‘Too right she did. She saw me painting in Suva. I worked my way to Suva, you know, from Aussie, and I got a job there. It was a swell job, too, while it lasted. Travelling for Jackson’s Confectionery. I bought this suit and some paints with my first cheque, and then I had a row with the boss and walked out on him. I used to paint all the time then. She saw me working and she reckoned I had talent, so she brought me home to England. The girl Sonia seemed to think I was living on charity.’

‘That was a very unpleasant interpretation to put upon a gracious action.’

‘Eh? Yeah! Yeah, that’s what I told her.’

‘Since you joined Miss Troy’s classes, have you become especially friendly with any one of the other students?’

‘Well, the little girl Lee’s all right. She treats you as if you were human.’

‘What about the men?’

‘Malmsley makes me tired. He’s nothing but a big sissie. The French bloke doesn’t seem to know he’s born, and Garcia’s queer. They don’t like me,’ said Hatchett, with extraordinary aggression, ‘and I don’t like them.’

‘What about Mr Pilgrim?’

‘Aw, he’s different. He’s all right. I get on with him good oh, even if his old pot is one of these lords. Him and me’s cobbers.’

‘Was he on good terms with the model?’

Hatchett looked sulky and uncomfortable.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he muttered.

‘You have never heard either of them mention the other?’

‘Naow.’

‘Nor noticed them speaking to each other?’

‘Naow.’