I was touched, but I had to explain that this Provençal, artist’s Mediterranean would have been as foreign to my straitlaced, bourgeois, industrious family as it was to him. “Our house was never flooded with light. The upholstery, for one thing. Maman would never have allowed it to fade.” For months of the year the blinds and curtains were closed through the broiling afternoons and then the electric lights put on for dinner, when we ate off good china and listened to my father, tired from a day in his office, try to defend himself from my mother’s complaining. I remembered the weddings, funerals, Sunday visits where the talk was all of clothes and babies and illnesses, and the men would go on for hours about the price of silk or salt or soap. “It was suffocating,” I said. “But we loved each other. And Célia and I were lucky. We were allowed to go swimming, meet selected friends on the beach.”

“Yes, what about the sea? Surely that was romantic?”

“To me, yes. Not to the fishermen. I used to go with Maman sometimes—there was a league of charitable ladies—and feed their children when the catch was poor.” I remembered the children’s big eyes fixed on the rib-sticking bowls of foul beans we set down in front of them. The stacks of round flatbreads went down so fast, you’d think it was by magic.

“Well, this Mediterranean is romantic,” Philip said. “It’s about light and color and shapes. And troubadours singing.” He began to do so from behind the easel. “Alas my lo-ove you doo me wrong to cast me o-off discourteouslee . . .”

I laughed out loud. “I could never be discourteous to you!”

“Oh, but you’ve got to, eventually. Hard-heartedly banish me. Not yet, of course. At least wait till this is finished. Now, I need something blue. To conjure up the Mediterranean sky.”

We pondered. Such a blue couldn’t be found for six hundred miles. I knew the color he needed. Hard, bright, heated like enamel . . .

“Moulin Alziari! The olive oil can!”

“Perfect.”

“And some bread, please. I’m starving.”

He was singing again under his breath. To the tune of “Greensleeves.” “My love, she fashioned her trousers new—from a tableclo-oth of navy hue . . .”

—

The painting took six weeks. I went to Upton on the same day at the same time. New James never asked where I was going. Once, when I was putting my coat on, he held the door open for me. I thought: he’s waiting for me to leave.

“What do you do when I’m out, James?”

He raised his eyebrows. “It’s a visiting afternoon. I thought you knew.”

Parish rounds. “Of course.”

“That’s why it’s so convenient.” He gave me a forbearing look. “What did you think I was up to?”