When they left, I went up to the studio to check the canvases. It had occurred to me, during a night of fitful sleep, that I had not really looked through the things and I could have overlooked an odd one here and there, which might cause a certain amount of interest, or consternation, among the removers Aronovich was sending the next day. Something from James’s ‘darker subjects’ perhaps? There was, however, nothing. All was well, everything had been scrupulously arranged and covered with sheets of old Var-Matin and Le Monde. The abstract canvases of the cliffs and the ruins of Jericho hamlet were stacked at one end, the ‘peasant heads’ for which Florence had posed at the other, and apart from a neat pile of assorted empty frames, the rows of brushes in tidy order, the easel standing sentinel in the centre of the room, all was correct, safe for invading eyes. Nothing untoward. I still found the abstracts gloomy, and the ‘peasant heads’, with their suggestion of countryside backgrounds, pale and lifeless. Aronovich had made a poor deal.

Leaving the hotel that morning I had carted a large cardboard box full of junk down to the car. It is extraordinary how one can, so to speak, ‘magpie away’ a hoard of bits and pieces gathered together in a few weeks from market stalls and junk shops. There was a china swan with a chipped wing, a Victorian vase covered in blackberries and scarlet leaves, a tin alarm clock from Germany and a cheap Indian bedspread, a-glitter with chips of mirror, to throw over the sagging sofa in the long room. This stuff was intended to impose some kind of ‘life’ on neglected Jericho, and with this in mind, and a slew of paperbacks and magazines to scatter about, I began to ‘dress the set’. Giles was busy, crouched on the tiled floor, snarling at me from time to time with mild irritation when I stepped on him.

On the long shelf which ran the length of the canopy over the open hearth I set the alarm clock, the swan and the vase in the centre, and in a frame which I had found in the studio the group photograph of the family at Dieppe.

It seemed to me in the room, with the settee now covered, flowers stuck about in the pottery jars, the clock ticking loudly, the Futurama posters on the walls, that a sense of ‘belonging’ had begun to invade the place, and with Giles fiddling about in the centre of the floor, the emptiness and feeling of loss had begun to disperse. At least to my mind.

Something clattered to the tiled floor, there was a muffled oath.

‘Giles! Come on. Get up, go out in the sun. What are you doing there?’

‘A lizard trap. I’m making a lizard trap. There are hundreds of them out on the terrace, little green ones, brown ones …’