There’s a painting which I very much admire. I think it’s obvious that it’s of, or very much inspired by, the village, but I doubt the person who now has it on their wall knows that, unless they have ever visited here, which I happen to know for a fact that they haven’t. I doubt they even know the name of the artist, which was a faint scrawl in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in the first place and became fainter when the second of the painting’s four owners carelessly left it directly opposite a large south-facing picture window in a bungalow overlooking the Derbyshire spa town of Matlock Bath. The painter’s name was Joyce Nicholas, and she lived here in Underhill between 1958, when she arrived in Devon from the north of England as a widow and retired teacher, and 1969, when her daughter Eva installed her in a retirement complex close to the stretch of coast known, jokingly by some and more seriously by others, as the English Riviera. She completed the painting in 1960 and, although she did sell one or two other similar expressionist works at that point via small local galleries and a short-lived bookshop owned by a friend, Joyce – always very hard on herself – decided it was not a success, and put it away in the loft. It did not leave her family until 1983 when, after his wife had fled from him and their legal union in a state of antimaterialist haste, Eva’s daughter Jane’s ex-husband Gerry gave it to the owner of a junk shop in Whitby, Yorkshire, free of charge. Gerry had hoped to receive a small sum for the painting but was hit with an uncharacteristic attack of guilt when, in examining a rug that Gerry was also hoping to rid himself of, the junk shop proprietor’s hand came into contact with some still quite damp excrement that had come out of the arse of Gerry’s bulldog The Fonz that morning, but which Gerry, in haste not dissimilar to Jane’s upon leaving him, had not spotted. The proprietor stared off into the middle distance of a deep back room full of broken clocks, grumbled inaudible quarter words and exhaled spouts of air from both corners of his mouth, and stated he wasn’t much interested in the painting. ‘The bottom has dropped right out of the market for this stuff,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a ton of it in my garage at home and can’t shift it for love nor money.’ He was, however, playing it cool, having quickly marked the painting out as something a little out of the ordinary and Gerry as an easily manipulated man whose main goal was to exit the building as quickly as possible. The proprietor had been the first to see any merit in Joyce’s landscape since a lodger who was living with Joyce, eight years after its creation. It now hangs above the stairway in a house in Edinburgh owned by two retired surgeons. Visitors remark on it more often than anything else in the house, apart from their cat, Villeneuve, who is white, fluffy and comically large.