Fifty minutes went by and a rhythm of line and mass grew under her hand. Back and forward she walked, making sharp accents with the end of her charcoal or sweeping it flat across the grain of the canvas. All that was Troy was now poured into her thin blackened hand. At last she stood motionless, ten paces back from her work, and, after an interval, lit a cigarette, took up her duster and began to flick her drawing. Showers of charcoal fell down the surface.

‘Don’t you like it?’ asked a sharp voice.

Troy jumped galvanically and turned. The little girl she had seen fighting on the terrace stood in the aisle, her hands jammed in the pockets of her pinafore and her feet planted apart.

‘Where did you come from?’ Troy demanded.

‘Through the end door. I came quietly because I’m not allowed. Why are you rubbing it out? Don’t you like it?’

‘I’m not rubbing it out. It’s still there.’ And indeed the ghost of her drawing remained. ‘You take the surplus charcoal off,’ she said curtly. ‘Otherwise it messes the paints.’

‘Is it going to be Noddy dressed up funny?’

Troy started at this use of a name she had imagined to be Miss Orrincourt’s prerogative and invention.

‘I call him Noddy,’ said the child, as if guessing at her thought, ‘and so does Sonia. She got it from me. I’m going to be like Sonia when I’m grown up.’

‘Oh,’ said Troy, opening her paint box and rummaging in it.

‘Are those your paints?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy, looking fixedly at her. ‘They are. Mine.’

‘I’m Patricia Claudia Ellen Ancred Kentish.’

‘So I’d gathered.’

‘You couldn’t have gathered all of that, because nobody except Miss Able ever calls me anything but Panty. Not that I care,’ added Panty, suddenly climbing onto the back of one of the stools and locking her feet in the arms, ‘I’m double jointed,’ she said, throwing herself back and hanging head downwards.

‘That won’t help you if you break your neck,’ said Troy.

Panty made an offensive gargling noise.

‘As you’re not allowed here,’ Troy continued, ‘hadn’t you better run off?’

‘No,’ said Panty.

Troy squeezed a fat serpent of Flake White out on her palette. ‘If I ignore this child,’ she thought, ‘perhaps she will get bored and go.’

Now the yellows, next the reds. How beautiful was her palette!

‘I’m going to paint with those paints,’ said Panty at her elbow.

‘You haven’t a hope,’ said Troy.

‘I’m going to.’ She made a sudden grab at the tray of long brushes. Troy anticipated this move by a split second.