The Wednesday. The nervous pair were driven to the gallery by Manita in the black Suburban. All felt dark, as if an enormous gulf had opened up between them in the aftermath of a row, a serious disagreement, but there had been no such thing.

Silence accompanied them on the drive.

The drive downtown: the journey to the viewing of John Everett Millen’s work. They were deposited by the car at the entrance with no need to valet as Manita was in charge of the black mass. They got out, the wheelchair was pulled from the back, Ever took her arm and walked her to the ease of her chair. They then adopted the familiar position of pushed and pusher and entered the gallery.

They walked to the section with the hermetically sealed glass doors, which opened without any effort from either of them, and towards the desk, millennia of metamorphic rock beneath their feet, to the waiting Miss Money-Root.

‘Good morning. Are we ready?’

‘Yes.’

Was all Ever could produce, he thought that charm and the attempt at conversation were over as she was needed no more.

They were escorted to a small gallery at the back of the building with a stone column carved with Private No Entry, vertically. It stood by the twenty-foot-high door, which Miss Money-Root opened with the minimum of effort despite its size. What was it with these doors? Ever brought his head back to an upright position, having read the sign.

‘I will leave you to it.’

Was her exit line.

Ever was in one of his sweats. And a panic, of course, and the shakes. He was about to see the reality of what he had kept inside him, of his father as a painter with a stymied talent, a genius cut off in his prime.

Lomita wheeled herself to the centre of the gallery, which was comparatively small by the standards of the rest of the building. She sat without a word.

There were twenty paintings: ten each on opposite walls and none on the other two. That was the first thing that struck Ever about the curating: why hadn’t they spread them evenly around the room?

The canvases were a blur, his nerves were making his eyes lose focus, this gave him time to make a prayer for them to be everything he wanted them to be. He prayed till the focus returned, for the lens, like a camera to pull to the point of precision.

And then.

Some of the paintings he recognised; his head swept across them all, fast, wanting to take them all in at once. He had seen some of them before, had spoken to his father about them.