On the night of Rosa’s second Dolomites instalment, I witnessed Kitten and Mr Parish in the back courtyard at La Coccinella. A rickety wrought-iron table and chair stood on uneven bricks and candlelight came from a wax stump in a red glass. It was hot inside the gallery: early April, but hot. Mrs Parish had not been in attendance. She had ‘headaches,’ said Mr Parish—‘Bloody change of life’. Kitten was in the courtyard smoking a cigarette and pulling jasmine from her cardigan where it had got tangled. Her teased blonde hair had come loose at the fringe—a hank of yellow fell across her line of vision. I could see she was itchy and irritable, and that something in the evening’s proceedings had maybe made her feel less vital than she had anticipated. She had this feeling sometimes—she had told me herself, she confided in me about these things: an intense, agitated disgruntlement that her mother had always ascribed to that time of the month, but Kitten ascribed much more generally to being female. She pulled the bit of jasmine creeper cleanly off her now-burled cashmere cardigan and swore and crunched the cigarette butt to bits beneath her foot.

I remained unseen in the shadows on a rusted trike that Papa kept parked in the bushes, in case I was bored when visiting. It was then that Mr Parish emerged, without signal, from the darkness along the side of the building. With barely a crunch of autumn leaf, his compact form silvered across the courtyard. Kitten’s disgruntlement went away—you could feel it ebb from the garden. She had been found after all!

‘Muri-el!’ said James Parish warningly. ‘Have you been hiding from me?’

Kitten clawed back her loose blonde lock and put one foot up against the wall. ‘You,’ she said, ‘have been otherwise engaged.’

I had never seen Kitten pout. She was generally quite straightforward and, unlike other adults, gave me lollies without using them to get promises out of me. But now she was using a voice I hadn’t heard before, and didn’t trust. And it surprised me that Mr Parish trusted it.

‘I’m very hungry and tired,’ she went on, ‘and perhaps you had a good meal made by your wife before you got here but I’ve been all day at the gallery and I haven’t had a bite to eat. Makes a girl cranky!’ She pouted again. ‘Are you taking me out to dinner?’

Mr Parish did something now that I couldn’t see, and Kitten squealed, and then laughed, and he murmured something low-pitch down her neck.

‘Well, if we can get out without being seen …’ Kitten said.

But Mr Parish was still absorbed in the neck of her blouse and, though Kitten was still laughing, she was also batting him off.

‘I want my steak, James,’ she said. ‘A girl needs a good meal. Steak with mushrooms and cream … Now how do we get out of here? Is there a back gate?’