The child he drew was lighter than air, her body in an angel’s robe, arms spread out and feet together. Her face, a sun with dark rays. Her eyes and mouth mine, her expression solemn. Her fingers and toes individually and carefully drawn. “I have probably given her Gerard’s fingers and toes,” Philip said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“It’s you, really, this picture,” he said. “I mean, your love for her.”

“Yes.”

But I was not sure. He had captured my vision, but this small stately suspended girl didn’t feel like her, or me, or my love for her. But Philip couldn’t have done any more.

The front door rattled open and Bridie appeared. “I’ve bought a Swiss roll,” she announced. “Philip, I hope you’ve got time for some tea?”

Philip looked at his watch. “I’d better go. I must get up to the school by eleven. I’m putting new panes into a greenhouse,” he told me.

Bridie said, “No, you’ll both have tea with me. Yvette can run you up to the school afterward. It’ll only take five minutes. You don’t mind, do you, dear?”

“No, of course not.”

We showed her the picture and she cried out, “Look, an angel!” And she put her arm around me without saying anything more. Perhaps she sensed my disappointment.

While we drank our tea, Philip produced a sketchbook and started drawing the teapot. I thought we’d have to be quiet again but Bridie said no, only when he was embarked on a big drawing, a portrait. “Not while he’s idly sketching. If that was true, I’d never get a word out.”

“I do nothing idly, mother.”

“I know.” She smiled. “I just wish—”

“She just wishes I was making a bit of money by now.”

“You weren’t meant to come out of it poor!” Bridie turned to me. “That art school. Like a palace, and those clever, gifted professors teaching him for nothing, the child of a couple like us, a bus driver and a—”

“Housewife,” Philip groaned. “I know.”

“I’m serious, my dear. That huge chance you were given, and now we want to see you prosper!”

“In a minute,” he tells me, “she’s going to say how my father went to school on a donkey. And he was lucky to do so. So as not to wear out his boots from walking. What happened to the donkey while he was at school, I wonder? Was he tethered outside?”