She went from the dining-room to the little theatre. Her canvas was leaning, face to the wall, where she had left it. She dragged it out, tipped it up on one corner, set it on the lowered tray of her easel and stepped back to look at it.

Across the nose and eyes of the completed head somebody had drawn in black paint an enormous pair of spectacles.

For perhaps five seconds alternate lumps of ice and red-hot coal chased each other down her spine and round her stomach. She then touched the face. It was hard dry. The black spectacles were still wet. With a sense of relief that was so violent that it came upon her like an attack of nausea, Troy clipped a rag in oil and gingerly wiped off the addition. She then sat down and pressed her shaking hands together. Not a stain, not a blur on the bluish shadows that she had twisted under the eyes, not a trace of dirt across the strange pink veil that was the flesh under his frontal bone. ‘Oh, Golly!’ Troy whispered. ‘Oh, Golly! Thank God! Oh, Golly!’

‘Good morning,’ said Panty, coming in by the side door. ‘I’m allowed to do another picture. I want some more board and lots more paint. Look, I’ve finished the cows and the aeroplane. Aren’t they good?’

She dumped her board on the floor against the foot of the easel, and, with a stocky imitation of Troy, fell back a pace and looked at it, her hands clasped behind her back. Her picture was of three vermilion cows in an emerald meadow. Above them, against a sky for which Panty had used neat New Blue, flew an emerald aeroplane in the act of secreting a black bomb.

‘Damn good,’ said Panty, ‘isn’t it?’ She tore her gaze away from her picture and allowed it to rest on Troy’s.

‘That’s good too,’ she said. ‘It’s nice. It gives me a nice feeling inside. I think you paint good pictures.’

‘Somebody,’ said Troy, watching her, ‘thought it would be better if I put in a pair of spectacles.’

‘Well, they must have been pretty silly,’ said Panty. ‘Kings don’t wear spectacles. That’s a king.’

‘Whoever it was, painted them on the face.’

‘If anybody puts spectacles on my cows,’ Panty said, ‘I’ll kill them.’

‘Who do you think could have done it?’

‘I dunno,’ said Panty without interest. ‘Did Noddy?’

‘I hardly think so.’

‘I suppose it was whoever put whatever it was on Noddy’s glass. Not me, anyway. Now can I have another board and more paint? Miss Able likes me to paint.’

‘You may go up to my room and get yourself one of the small boards in the cupboard.’

‘I don’t know where your room is.’