Troy explained as best she could. ‘Oh, well,’ said Panty, ‘if I can’t find it I’ll just yell till somebody comes.’

She stumped away to the side door. ‘By the way,’ Troy called after her, ‘would you know a Raspberry if you saw one?’

‘You bet,’ said Panty with interest.

‘I mean a rubber thing that makes a noise if you sit on it.’

‘What sort of noise?’

‘Never mind,’ said Troy wearily. ‘Forget about it.’

‘You’re mad,’ said Panty flatly and went out.

‘If I’m not,’ Troy muttered, ‘there’s somebody in this house who is.’

All that morning she painted solidly through the background. In the afternoon Sir Henry posed for an hour and a half with two rests. He said nothing, but sighed a great deal. Troy worked at the hands, but he was restless, and kept making small nervous movements so that she did little more than lay down the general tone and shape of them. Millamant came in just before the end of the sitting, and, with a word of apology, went to him and murmured something indistinguishable. ‘No, no,’ he said angrily. ‘It must be tomorrow. Ring up again and tell them so.’

‘He says it’s very inconvenient.’

‘That be damned. Ring up again.’

‘Very well, Papa,’ said the obedient Millamant.

She went away, and Troy, seeing that he was growing still more restless, called an end to the sitting, telling him that Cedric had offered to pose for the cloak. He left with evident relief. Troy grunted disconsolately, scraped down the hands, and turned again to the background. It was a formalized picture of a picture. The rooky wood, a wet mass, rimmed with boldly stated strokes of her brush, struck sharply across a coldly luminous night sky. The monolithic forms in the middle distance were broadly set down as interlocking masses. Troy had dragged a giant brush down the canvas, each stroke the summing-up of painful thinking that suddenly resolved itself in form. The background was right, and the Ancreds, she reflected, would think it very queer and unfinished. All of them, except, perhaps, Cedric and Panty. She had arrived at this conclusion when on to the stage pranced Cedric himself, heavily and most unnecessarily made-up, moving with a sort of bouncing stride, and making much of his grandfather’s red cloak.

‘Here I am,’ he cried, ‘feeling so keyed up with the mantle of high tragedy across my puny shoulders. Now, what precisely is the pose?’

There was no need to show him, however. He swept up his drape, placed himself, and, with an expert wriggle, flung it into precisely the right sweep. Troy eyed it, and, with a sense of rising excitement, spread unctuous bands of brilliant colour across her palette.

Cedric was an admirable model. The drape was frozen in its sculptured folds. Troy worked in silence for an hour, holding her breath so often that she became quite stuffy in the nose.