The room – kitchen, dining room and living room all in one – took up the entire ground floor. The range with six hobs, the table to seat twelve, the three sofas made it much too big for Irene. I refrained from enquiring further, and let her show me how to scale fish. I peeled potatoes, washed the lettuce and made a salad dressing; I can’t cook, but I can make a good dressing. Irene asked what I had been doing in Sydney, what I did in Frankfurt, asked after my wife and children and whether I was content with my life. I didn’t want to give away any more about myself than she did, but she turned any of the few questions I managed to ask into a question of her own, giving nothing away. And yet, when we were finally sitting on the balcony, eating, we had created a bit of intimacy – while cooking, talking, the moments when we’d touched, when I held her as she used a ladder to get a bottle of oil from a high cupboard, when I helped her with a blocked drain and a sticky drawer.

I saw the boat before I heard it. I had not looked at the time once. As the putter of the engine came into earshot, Irene said: “You didn’t come here for no reason. When do you want to talk?”

“I’ll come again tomorrow.”

“You can stay here. There are six empty rooms upstairs. I’ll find pyjamas and overalls for you, so you don’t get your clothes dirty when you help me tomorrow.”

So I went down to the jetty and talked to Mark. He asked whether I didn’t want to give him my car keys. Then he could bring my luggage with him tomorrow. In case I stayed longer.

3

By the time I had got back to the balcony, she had cleared the table and opened a bottle of red.

“Did Schwind want to keep all his paintings, or just the one of you?” I wanted to tread lightly.

“He wanted to keep the pictures he felt defined him as an artist. That spoke to issues in contemporary painting: what representation and abstraction can offer, their relationship to photography, how beauty and truth interact.”

“And your painting?”

“It was an answer to Marcel Duchamp. Do you know Nude Descending a Staircase? A cubist figure, breaking up in the moments of descent, a vortex of legs, ass, arms and heads? Duchamp’s work was talked about as the end of painting, and Schwind wanted to show that a naked woman descending a staircase could still be painted.”

I did not understand. “Why should what Duchamp painted be the ‘end of painting’?”