I had thought Mrs Parish’s success in the field of floral arrangement, as Mr Parish put it, might have been a good opportunity for my case for a bedroom mural of Paddy Cow in the Garden. But it was not to be. Mrs Parish had won on account of flowers, but flowers had not in themselves proven anything. Nor had Rosa. ‘No, Owen,’ Mr Parish said. ‘There will be no Paddy Cow on your bedroom wall. Unless you draw her yourself, on paper, and we pin it up.’ Though Mr Parish liked art on his walls, he did not like his walls to become art. Murals (he never dared to say this in front of Rosa) were not art. Walls in bedrooms were to be painted white and they were to stay painted white. ‘And anyway, wouldn’t you want something a little, well, more boyish, than flowers on your walls, Owen? You could have a medieval battle scene. Or something from Arthur.’

Maybe he would’ve given in to a proposal for a jungle. But a jungle was not a garden. I wanted Paddy Cow in a flower garden. A boy was not supposed to want gentle things like moony calves and carnations in his bedroom. But, like any child, I was scared of monsters under beds. I didn’t want battle scenes and fortresses watching over me. I didn’t want boa constrictors or aliens who took little children hostage and did experiments on them, or atomic bombs that blew up the whole world. The world had been formed by a Big Bang explosion; the universe was terrifying. Even a flower garden wasn’t entirely safe. There was a Lion in the Meadow, after all—and a dragon came out of a matchbox to scare it away. I wanted to be safe. I didn’t understand why Mr Parish couldn’t understand this.

When I told Rosa I couldn’t have a mural after all, she was nonplussed. ‘Ah well,’ she said and shrugged. ‘You tried, huh?’ I had expected her to be cross, but Rosa never got cross with Mr Parish—though Mother did, and even Papa occasionally, and Barrington Knox called him a ‘mean little brute’. Mother said Rosa had rose-coloured glasses on when it came to Mr Parish.

‘Without James Parish,’ Rosa said, ‘I would never be brave enough to make art. I would’ve just got married to a greengrocer.’

‘That might be nice, Rosa,’ I said. ‘It might be nice to be married to a greengrocer.’ We were in the kitchen at La Coccinella as usual; she was stirring something frothy in a pan and I was nibbling salami. ‘You could get fruit and vegetables for free. My friend at school, his mum and dad have a stall at the Richmond Market. His name is George. They sell nearly every kind of vegetable.’ I gulped back a bit of string with my meat. ‘They have a doughnut van at the Richmond Market. Ten cents for three. You could’ve bought doughnuts for your kids.’