In this series – as Kim has numbered them – Orla is the main focus. We start with a close-up (just her wan face, etched in tears), then slowly inch further back, then further still … The Miss Hahn photo comes last in order of number. But in fact – if we study her distant progress along the tideline – it was actually the first.

How extraordinary, I muse, that simply by swapping the order of these images Kim has transformed so completely the mood and the focus … The original order makes Miss Hahn the centre of it all (Bran Cleary is watching her, painting her, and Orla, quietly ignored – marginalized by her wanton ‘nurse’ – cries and prays). The new order? Orla is crying, then, as we pull back, she is praying, alone. But after a while, we see the father, standing guard. Orla isolates herself, but she is, at some level, cherished and protected.

And yet … If Kim was so eager to keep Miss Hahn’s significance to a minimum in the narrative (and the question this inevitably begs is: how, if Bran Cleary and Miss Hahn were … were … you know, did it happen that merely a few weeks later Kim and he were apparently …? Well, I suppose stranger things have happened. Did Miss Hahn ultimately reject Bran Cleary’s advances? Did the affair with Kim happen on the rebound? These two interludes were separated by the tragic death of his daughter, after all; did this damn family ever do anything, ever say anything, that wasn’t riven with drama, with significance? The rest of us live dreary lives in a slightly smudged close type. Their life was handwritten in exquisitely ornate calligraphy. Gold-embossed. With tiny, inked illustrations highlighting the opening letter of every paragraph) … uh, no, I was saying, why, if Kim was so keen to keep Miss Hahn’s narrative significance to a minimum, did she tell me to come to Pett Level in the first place and actively seek her out?

Why undo all her hard work like that in one fell swoop?

Why?

Well I suppose if she didn’t recommend I come here, if she didn’t mention Miss Hahn like that, just casually, in passing, I might have felt a surreptitious impulse to travel here under my own steam. And then I’d have been way more … more professional, more inquisitive, more alert. As it was I simply felt … obliged. Hence the first month of resentment, casual charm and sloth. Followed by two weeks of arguing and doodling (during at least one of these, permanently drunk).

Did Kim honestly understand my little proclivities, my idle faults so well? I find the thought quite … quite bewildering, no, no, almost touching, somehow.

Am I really to be considered such a formidable adversary, then? Or – and this isn’t such an appealing idea – so ridiculously easy to play, so pathetically biddable, so ludicrously transparent?

Hmmn?

If only I could remove myself – my natural prejudices – from the equation. If only I could step away and … somehow detach … be truly clinical, dispassionate …