Which world am I living in? The question haunted Angus. He was an artist and he believed that he had a vocation. He had to create – that is what he wanted to do, and he believed that the need he felt to do this was as important to him as food and drink. He could not envisage life without the ability to pick up a brush and put paint to canvas; it was not something he did because he earned his living in this way, or because it kept boredom at bay; he did it because that was the reason why he got out of bed each morning. He lived to paint.

And yet, he wondered what good this powerful urge had done either him or the world in general. Artists, like anybody else, had a social purpose, which was … what? To increase the amount of beauty in the world? If this was what artists were for, then he was, in a sense, a mere decorator. Or did the creation of beauty have a purpose beyond the deed of its creation? Beauty and truth were linked, he had always assumed, and to create beauty was to state a truth. And if one stated a truth, one was revealing that truth to others and that, surely, was worth doing for itself.

As an artist he was committed to beauty, and yet what contribution to an understanding of beauty had he made? He thought of his portrait painting. When he painted a portrait he tried to capture something about the essence of the sitter. The perception of that essence might have an uplifting effect on the person who gazed upon the painting, but that, he thought, was rare, and was possibly restricted to portraits of beautiful sitters. It did not apply, he thought, to his unfinished portrait of Ramsey Dunbarton, the retired solicitor who had been so inordinately proud of playing the part of the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers at the Churchhill Theatre. His portrait of Ramsey, not completed because of the death of the sitter – in Angus’s studio – added nothing to human understanding. All that it said was that there was once a man who looked like this, who was painted by this particular artist. It was of no greater interest, Angus told himself, than an entry in an old telephone directory. Such entries say there was once a person called this who lived at this address and who could be reached at this number.

I must do something permanent, he thought. And then he thought of Italy, and of all that it meant for our sense of beauty. I shall paint something of great significance there, he thought.

He shivered. Something was upon him – filling him with a sense of power and possibility. A great painting, he thought. At last.

40. A Moment on Queen Street