These were not abstract paintings: there were no jagged lines, no vicious curves, no triangles or disturbing cubes, lines upon lines, fading into an infinity of, as always in his works, darkness.

A young woman’s face stared back at me, almost without expression except, perhaps, sadness. Not particularly beautiful; pleasant looking in a perfectly ordinary peasant way. A simple girl doing simple things in three-quarter length. I pulled out three or four more. The same girl. In all of them she was occupied with ordinary household things: stringing beans at a table, kneading bread, darning, holding a bunch of wild flowers. No change in the expression – a faint bewilderment, perhaps; certainly, to my mind anyway, the sadness.

I raked through the pile and took up the last one leaning hard against the white wall. The same girl, in a pink and white blouse, sleeves rolled up, pouring milk from a pitcher into a deep earthenware bowl, like Vermeer’s milk-maid. But there was no ‘feel’ of Vermeer about the composition, no radiance, no love for the curve of an arm, the tilt of the head, no delicacy of line, brilliance of colour, no simplicity really, no sweetness and above all, perhaps, absolutely no sense of affection for either the subject or the task which she was performing. James had singularly failed to record the harmony of light or the subtlety or contrast in colour, the feeling of shadow, or reflections.

The paintings were unsigned and undated, so it was impossible to tell just when he had made this effort to alter his style and get away from the almost mathematical harshness of his cubes and jagged edges and vibrant colours. It was perfectly clear that he had made a valiant attempt, but he had missed, it would seem, even to my uncritical eye. Well, ‘uncritical’ in that I am not an expert.

These were as banal and without life, as unfeeling, or unfelt, and as barren of emotion as if he had painted them by numbers. They amounted to a series of dull statements about humdrum tasks performed by a humdrum creature. Quite without joy or life. They were the sort of things which could have been used as ‘good taste’ Christmas cards for stockbrokers. Nothing more.

I stacked them back against the wall, covered them with the newspaper, and brushed my hands on my trousers for, however tidy the place seemed to be to the naked eye, the dust had settled pretty thickly, indicating that the room had been abandoned for some time. A date on one of the pieces of newspaper stated that it was printed on the 19th of December, but proved nothing.