His leg was aching seriously now. He’d swallowed a couple of painkillers and got himself a whisky from the bar, which he’d brought upstairs so that he could think his own thoughts and escape for a bit from the increasing chumminess of the group. Too bad if they thought him unsociable, though he’d made a real effort to be friendly at supper and sat between bright, bird-like little Win, who was clearly developing unexpected talents, and jowly Morwenna, who wasn’t. Nice women, both of them, and he’d been surprised to find how interesting they were to talk to, in their very different ways. Win had a beady eye for unexpected detail, a dry sense of humour and a shrewd way of summing people up which made her good company, though Christopher felt it might be as well to be a little guarded in her deceptively mild presence lest one should become fodder for a sharp little character sketch. She was the sort of woman in whom it would be easy to confide and give away more information than one intended. Despite the potentially undermining effect of the steady drip, drip, drip of her husband’s barbed criticisms, he thought Win actually had far more self-assurance than Morwenna, who was clearly finding the demands of the course very taxing.

In the five o’clock session after tea, Catherine had presented them each with a postcard of Chagall’s I and the Village, and suggested that they should write down their reactions to the painting. ‘I want your instant reactions. Try to put down what really hits you, not what you feel you should notice or what you may already know about the picture,’ she said. ‘I don’t want second-hand artistic criticism.’

‘I can give you my instant reactions here and now,’ Stanley had spluttered, rudely flipping his postcard back across the table to Catherine, ‘but you won’t like them. The artist’s a lunatic and the picture’s a bloody insult, that’s what.’

‘Well write that down then, Stanley. It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not.’ Catherine tried to keep an edge out of her voice; she was getting tired of Stanley’s sniping. ‘It’s getting your imaginative response on paper that matters,’ she said to the class as a whole, ‘so that you can work it into something later – prose or poetry – if you want to.’

‘Is it a fairy tale?’ asked Bunty hopefully. ‘I think it might be rather a scary one for children.’

‘You tell us,’ Catherine invited her.

Stanley had thrown his pen down and banged out of the room, fully expecting that there would be an instant move to persuade him to return, but no one followed him and his wife watched him go with a speculative look.