It was Sargent, years later at the Royal Academy, who said he found my paintings too gray. Yet the one that seems to me to most closely evoke this time is anything but somber. There is a black line running diagonally across it, dividing the almost monotone blue of the upper part from the murky whiteness of the central space. I had the sand and sea in my eyes as I worked on it, but as I look at it now what I see is something else. The blue is separated so completely from the white that it is as if the painting captures two different worlds. At the front, in the left-hand corner, set against the barren whiteness, is a yellow-brown triangle, a rock, perhaps. Two figures sit in its shadow. One is bigger than the other and the clothes and pose suggest a mother and child. The figures are viewed from behind and all we see of the mother is the back of her coat and the brim and crown of her hat. The child is similarly attired, though there is an alertness in the tilt of the hat that is entirely absent from the mother’s outline. The abstractness of the form suggests vacancy, as if the mother’s vital presence has somehow been extinguished. Opposite the pair, on the right, near the boundary line, is a large, luminous shape. Before it stands a woman dressed in blue, her long hair hanging down her back. At her feet a group of children squat, engrossed in play. I think of the bathing hut Mother used to change in, but as I look again it is not this I see. What dominates as I look at the picture today is the ethereal radiance of this lone object. It is as if the woman is devoured by its brilliance. There is the bare expanse on which the children focus their attention, while the mother slips into unmitigated blue. Yet I never imagined Mother in heaven.

“Do you miss her?” I know as soon as I have spoken that my question is a mistake. Stella bows her head over her sewing, trying to hide her distress. I want to claw my words back, undo the hurt they have caused. Since Mother’s death Stella has become indispensable to me and I would do anything to avoid giving her pain. I know how tired she is. I hear her at night, getting up to attend to Father, soothing his grief-stricken outbursts. It is Stella who manages the household now. I realize that the angle of her neck as she leans over her sewing is an exact replica of the way Mother sat.

“Ginia called out in her sleep again last night.” The ploy works. Stella lifts her head and looks at me.

“Were you able to make out any of what she was saying?”

“Not very much.”