When Bram enters the house in Bloomsbury he sees so few changes that he is taken back to the very first time he came to Mangan’s home. The dog has gone, and the children are each a little taller. Jane has gray hair now, and Perry has lost the bloom of youth, but otherwise, much is as it was. The hallway is still full of coats and boots and clutter. Doors are missing from doorways. Electricity has been installed but is not used. The hole in the wall from the house into the studio space remains. The air of pandemonium under light restraint continues.

“Children, run along, do.” Jane shoos three small boys ahead of her down the hallway. “Bram has had a long journey and the last thing he needs is all your noise. Come along, dear, Mangan is so looking forward to seeing you again. Freedom, go and put the kettle on, will you? Such a helpful boy. Couldn’t have managed without him when Mangan was away.” She pauses and lowers her voice. “You will find my darling husband a little … older,” she warns him. “He is not as robust as once he was. Still,” she adds, brightening again, “having you here will be just the tonic he requires. I’m certain of it.”

Bram braces himself for an elderly Mangan in a bath chair, so he is astonished to find the great man halfway up a ladder, paintbrush in hand, putting the finishing touches to a startling mural that covers one entire wall of the studio.

“Mangan, my dear, Bram is here,” Jane calls up to him.

“What’s that? Bram from Yorkshire? Well, don’t just stand there gawping, my young friend, make yourself useful. Pass me up another pot of paint, would you? Over there. The pea-green. That’s the one. Want to get this tree finished before Jane starts clucking like a mother hen and insists I put my feet up. Woman thinks I’m an invalid.”

“I think no such thing, I simply believe a little rest and some soup from time to time might just stop you wearing yourself to a frazzle. Talk him down from there, Bram, dear, do,” she says, leaving them with an exasperated flap of her hands.

“Woman would have me spoon-fed if I let her.”

“She’s only trying to look after you.”

“I am perfectly sound in wind and limb, as you can see,” says Mangan, letting go of the ladder to brandish his paintbrush expansively. He teeters horribly, and for a moment Bram thinks he will fall, but he grasps the wooden tread above him once more and continues applying paint, seemingly unperturbed.

“That’s quite some mural,” says Bram, taking in the image of a sweep of English countryside, complete with farm, barns, stream, and hedgerows. Many artists might have rendered such a scene cloyingly sentimental, but in Mangan’s hands it is depicted as something vibrant, bold, and bursting with life.