‘Yes, well of course,’ Troy said and it was clear that she meant: ‘Of course you’re a painter and you were right to show me this.’ She went on talking to Andrew asking him about his palette and the conditions under which he worked. Then she saw his next canvas which was a portrait. Desirée’s flaming hair and cadaverous eyes leapt out of a flowery background. She had sat in a glare of sunlight and the treatment was far from being conventional.

‘My mum,’ Andrew said.

‘You had fun with the colour, didn’t you? Don’t you find the eye-round-the-corner hell to manage in a three-quarter head? This one hasn’t quite come off, has it? Look, it’s that dab of pink that hits up. Now, let’s see the next one.’

The next and last one was a male torso uncompromisingly set against a white wall. It had been painted with exhaustive attention to anatomy. ‘Heavens!’ Troy ejaculated, ‘you’ve practically skinned the man.’ She looked at it for some time and then said: ‘Well, what are you going to do about this? Would you like to work here once a week?’

After that Andrew was able to talk to her and did so with such evident delight that Nicola actually detected in herself a twinge of something that astonished her and gave an edge to her extreme happiness.

It was not until much later, when Troy had produced lager, and they were telling her about the Grantham Gallery project, that Nicola remembered Mr Period.

‘I think,’ she told Troy, ‘you’re going to be approached by my new boss. He’s writing a book on etiquette and his publishers want a drawing of him. He’s rather shy about asking because you turned down one of his lordly chums. You know him, don’t you? Mr Pyke Period?’

‘Yes, of course I do. He crops up at all the private views that he thinks are smart occasions. I’ll be blowed if I’ll draw him.’

‘I was afraid that might be your reaction.’

‘Well,’ Troy said, ‘there’s no denying he really is a complete old phoney. Do you know he once commissioned a pupil of mine to do a painting from some print he’d picked up, of a Georgian guardee making faces at a thunderstorm. He said it was one of his ancestors and so it may have been, but after a lot of beating about the bush he made it quite clear that he wanted this job faked to look like an eighteenth-century portrait. My pupil was practically on the breadline at the time and I’m afraid the thing was done.’

‘Oh, dear!’ Nicola sighed. ‘I know. It’s there, in the library, I think. He’s like that but he’s rather an old sweetie-pie, all the same. Isn’t he, Andrew?’

‘Nicola,’ said Andrew, ‘I dare say he is. But he’s a terrible old donkey. And yet – I don’t know. Is P.P. just plain silly? I doubt it. I rather think there’s an element of low cunning.’