Rosa stuck a fork into a jar of olives. ‘Thing is: what you need here is not sad-eyed paintings while you eat dinner. Not crazy-face people whirling round your head. You want fields of wheat. You want waterfall and pebbles and sun. You want Nature. This is where food comes from. Nature. You got to think like a restaurateur, not like a art critic, Jo.’

Papa thought about this. He talked to Mother about it.

After work now, Mother came straight to 123. She sat at the window-seat, with a book in her hand—‘posing’, Papa joked. At close of business, she and Papa would catch the tram home to East Melbourne. They would get off the tram at Clarendon Street, curl up in Mother’s bed, and in the morning, Mother would slip off to work and leave Papa snoring his rasping child’s snore till he woke, all of a start, sweating, wondering where she was.

It was practice for marriage, Mother said, though of course, she would have no job to go to once she got married, no reason to get out of bed.

Mother loved that Papa was learning about art. She had started scouring second-hand bookshops for art books, bringing home treasures: Vasari’s Life of the Artists; a beautiful unbound collection of Eugene van Guerard plates that set her back several weeks’ wages.

‘Get Rosa to paint a mural,’ said Mother. They were in her East Melbourne living room on the new yellow-buttoned sofa. It was hot. She got up and her nightdress stuck to her bottom. She trotted into the bedroom for the latest collection of art magazines she had got cut-rate at Blundell’s Books. She flicked through them, tossed one after another aside. ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting a dog-eared magazine in Papa’s lap. ‘Diego Rivera. Look. Communist mural art!’

‘I don’t like this much,’ said Papa. ‘It’s very crowded.’ He turned the magazine around and cocked his head.

‘Something crowded might make the restaurant look full,’ said Mother.

Papa turned the page. And Mother saw he was struck by something. She leaned over his shoulder to see.

It was an image by a Brazilian painter called Candido Portinari. The Hill, 1933. ‘Something like that,’ Papa said, holding it out to her, ‘that would work.’

The hill in Portinari’s painting was rich brown in colour and very steep; people walked up it with goods balancing on their heads, ice blocks or cans or milk-jugs. In the left distance, the sea beckoned. In the foreground, a sullen woman looked out a window. The painting felt easy to look at to Papa: the curves, the angles, the literalness. People would understand it. They would be calmed by it and reassured by it and they would be happy to eat pasta alongside it. ‘Something like that,’ he said again to Mother.

‘Sure I do a mural,’ said Rosa the next day. ‘You want St Kilda Beach? You want Esplanade, seagulls?’

‘No,’ said Papa. ‘This is an Italian restaurant. I want Italy.’