‘That’s lovely,’ she said. ‘What a lovely giraffe, such a nice long neck!’ She gazed at it a moment longer, putting her head to one side. ‘But perhaps you could make the dinosaur more vicious …’ and she took the pen and in one fluid move transformed my dinosaur from common garden-variety giraffe-eater to seriously terrifying predator. She gave a swing and dash to the devouring motion of the dinosaur that I could not account for. Suddenly, the giraffe looked very dead in its teeth. I stared at her in wonder.

‘Florence is a good drawer, hey, Owen,’ said Rosa, who came beside us with coffee for Florence and chocolate for me. ‘Florence Oakey: “Best draughtswoman in Melbourne”. That’s what the Age said.’

‘Oh shush, Rosa,’ said Florence Oakey. ‘Let me drink my coffee. Then we’ll go to the pictures.’

Florence Oakey was a good drawer. I wondered why Mr Parish didn’t want her drawings in Works on Paper. Then I remembered what he said about her line being too sloppy, too curvaceous. I talked briefly to Kitten about it. I didn’t see much of Kitten these days, but every now and then she popped into the restaurant after the gallery closed. Sometimes she had a telephone message to relay to Papa, but most often she just wanted to have a glass of wine and be around people. The gallery, she said, was very quiet, very boring. I was always glad to see her. Sometimes she stayed and ate at La Coccinella—‘It’s such a waste of time,’ she said, ‘cooking for one’—and sometimes she quizzed me:

‘What sort of a house does Mr Parish have, Owen?’

‘What does Mrs Parish make you to eat? Is she a good cook?’

‘How old do you think I look, Owen? Say, if you saw me in the street, do I look … twenty-five or thirty?’

I couldn’t tell the difference between twenty-five and thirty. I knew Mother was thirty-six, but between Mother and Kitten there lay a chasm of time and circumstance. Kitten was a sparky little cat-thing with new clothes and dimpled cheeks. Mother hardly ever bothered to dress in nice clothes anymore, and she had bits of grey in the sides of her hair. You cared about practicality before you cared about aesthetics these days. And Rosa and Mrs Parish, my two other measures of womanhood, were so ancient they were beyond age entirely.

Kitten lowered her voice. ‘Do you know why Mrs Parish never had any babies, Owen?’

I looked up from my drawing of a pyramid on fire and shook my head. Mrs Parish’s lack of babies had never occurred to me. I couldn’t imagine her with a baby.

Kitten wound spaghetti around her fork. When she slurped the forkful up, a speck of sauce remained in the corner of her mouth in what seemed to me a rude and un-grown-up-like manner. She swirled wine around in her glass.