He got the boy to sit down and asked him if he understood the reason for the interview. Cliff nodded and clenched and unclenched his wide mobile hands. Behind him, beyond open windows, glared a noonday garden, the plateau, blank with sunshine, and the mountains, etherealized now by an intensity of light. Shadows on those ranges appeared translucent as though the sky beyond shone through. Their snows dazzled the eyes and seemed to be composed of light without substance. A nimbus of light rimmed Cliff’s hair. Alleyn thought that his wife would have liked to paint the boy, and would have found pleasure in reflected colour that swam in the hollow of his temples and beneath the sharp arches of his brows. He said: ‘Are you interested in painting as well as music?’

Cliff blinked at him and shuffled his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine is keen. Anything that—I mean—there aren’t so many people—I mean—’

‘I only asked you,’ Alleyn said, ‘because I wondered if it would be as difficult to express this extraordinary landscape in terms of music as it would be to do so in terms of paint.’ Cliff looked sharply at him. ‘I don’t understand music, you see,’ Alleyn went on. ‘But paint does say something to me. When I heard that music was your particular thing, I felt rather lost. The technique of approach through channels of interest wouldn’t work. So I thought I’d try a switch-over. Any good or rotten?’

‘I’d rather do without a channel of approach, I think,’ Cliff said. ‘I’d rather get it over, if you don’t mind.’ But, instead of allowing Alleyn to follow this suggestion, he added, half-shamefaced: ‘That’s what I wanted to do. With music, I mean. Say something about this.’ He jerked his head at the vastness beyond the window and added with an air of defiance, ‘And I don’t mean the introduction of native bird song and Maori hakas into an ersatz symphony.’ Alleyn heard an echo of Fabian Losse in this speech.

‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that the forcible injection of local colour is the catch in any aesthetic treatment of this country. There is no forcing the growth of an art, is there, and, happily, no denying it when the moment is ripe. Is your music good?’

Cliff sank his head between his shoulders and, with the profundity of the very young, said: ‘It might have been. I’ve chucked it.’

‘Why?’

Cliff muttered undistinguishably, caught Alleyn’s eye and blurted out: ‘The kind of things that have happened to me.’