I can rent the pigeonnier at Saint-Basile from the Prideaux family. They very warm and pleasant. Rent reasonable, they delighted to get it off their hands, hard to let because too lonely, small and no telephone. Suggest a year to start with and then to make further negotiations. This agreed. F. agrees to help me clear out hay loft for studio and they all agree to me installing a north-light, which I will have done by Monsieur Simon in the village. F. [obviously now Florence] more and more curious and interested in my work, and makes sensible, intelligent comments. We spend a lot of time together. She is lonely, only child (soldier brother dead last year in motorcycle crash), stuck with widow mother, pleasant, tough, army-type, but a good heart, I imagine. F. drives me over to pigeonnier whenever her domestic duties allow. Take picnics of bread, cheese, ham, fruit, wine. Agreeable indeed. I feel twenty all over again, and she makes me laugh. I begin to think that I could put down my roots here, but it is late at night as I write this and I have taken my wine … however, I have not felt so settled, so happy, so secure for years. This is my little ‘promised land’ and I think, think, think, I have found my refuge after all the years of rootlessness. I will be prudent naturally. The cliffs fill me with wonder, I shall never tire of painting them, or trying to capture their magnificence. Oh God! Could this really be the gates of paradise? I wonder? I’m pissed!

And there it ends. It is not picked up again until late October, but at least we do have the first introduction to Florence here; she’s now in the story. But what is the story, I wondered?

I had not seen, when I looked, any of the cliff pictures about which he writes with such joy and delight. But then I had hardly really looked at any of the canvases stacked up in the studio, apart from those of the obviously-not-peasant Florence. The ones hanging on the wall might have been his abstracts of the cliffs – I’m not clever enough to know, frankly. I dislike that sort of wild painting, restless and, as far as I can see, only ever in the eye of the artist himself, not the eye of the beholder. Surely, like a writer, a painter must get across to his audience? He didn’t to me. But as Helen had often said, I’m pretty dense sometimes. Sometimes. Dense, successful and cheap. She said that too.

In late October there is a sudden flurry of writing. But it doesn’t last long.