This was a big deal for Tom and I tried faithfully to read it, but my thoughts kept getting jumbled up with the print and nothing made sense. I shut it again and wandered to the next drawing and the next: more young women—Venuses and Madonnas and Florentine aristocrats—gazing down from the walls in silent appeal. They looked like living beings that had been turned into chalk and trapped inside sheets of paper, and it made my heart sink to look at them.

Tom came and stood beside me. I wouldn’t have noticed, except that he stayed still for so long in the same spot and kept shooting glances in my direction. If it had been anyone else it would have got on my nerves, but even in my current mood I couldn’t object to him.

“Shouldn’t you be circulating?” I said.

“I am,” he replied. “I’m just taking my time about it.”

I retreated to one of the benches in the middle of the room and I was happy enough when he followed. Tom was good company. For one thing, he never made me feel I should talk for the sake of talking. For another—and I know this sounds odd—he had a nice smell: sort of biscuity, with overtones of coffee and pencil shavings. It always made me feel nostalgic, as if by breathing it in I was recovering something soothing from the past. People rolled their eyes at Tom; even Dad did. Oh, Tom’s too nice for his own good was the general verdict, as though that made him ridiculous. I never found him ridiculous, and there were times I was on the brink of telling him so—but it’s not the kind of thing you can say in so many words.

“Congratulations on your essay,” I said, patting the cover of the catalogue, and Tom nodded.

The picture in front of us was a charcoal study of hands: gnarled hands, baby hands, clasped hands, pointing hands, hands in fists, hands lying on a tabletop with their fingers loosely curled.

“Do you think your dad’s enjoying himself?” said Tom. “He’s looking very—what’s the word? Avian.”

I smiled faintly. There was something birdlike about the way my father darted from picture to picture, his sharp nose thrust forward, his lips pinched, his spectacles opaque where they caught the light. Whenever a thought for his forthcoming review occurred, he’d stop dead and make a note in the catalogue.

“It’s going all right, isn’t it?” I said vaguely. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

I had no idea whether it would be fine or not. There was a time when I’d have given my eyeteeth for the chance to sit next to Tom like this, and say reassuring things to him. If it was bleak to admit that Raphael bored me, it was a thousand times worse to admit that Tom did.

Tom drew his fingertips slowly over his chin, as if trying to remember when he’d last shaved.

“Are you all right?” he said after a while. “Only you seem, I don’t know . . .”