He took the bracelet back. My wrists were bare. They still are.

BUT: MY BEDROOM. After lunch I would rest in my room. I would lie on my bed, the blue cover at my feet. There was the ceiling, so white, and a shaft of sunlight that moved, so slowly, across. So quiet. No sound at all. The children still at school, the maids taking their break, in their yard. Josias, I would picture him, on his chair with a cigarette — the dogs, alongside, sleeping. Flies in the yard, I imagined them. The grey stones, there. Pale weeds.

I said once I’d buy seeds to grow carrots, or lettuce, did Josias want to plant seeds in his yard? Josias didn’t want to do that, Josias didn’t do that, even after I brought a packet of seeds home from the hardware store. Josias, Josias, who tended our garden.

But I would lie in my room, the stillness of the afternoon around me. I would close my eyes. If I lay, and kept still for long enough, the vision would come to me. I thought of it as a spell. Or an honoured, a greatly honoured, guest.

I felt the white room beyond my closed eyes, but it was also within me, illumined by the wide window. And the painting would be there, in my mind.

A large, a very large painting. A rectangle. Lit from within. But by what? It was all white. But not all white, of course not all white. It had many shades and gradations of white, so many I couldn’t count or discern them. Ivories, ivories. Glistenings of pallor, so faint. But ordered, into a great harmony. The peace of it, of the painting, would enter me. You might say, into my stream — like a drug. (I’ve never taken a drug.)

I might fall asleep, then, for a short while. And, now, I picture myself on that bed, recumbent as an effigy, like those figures you know in all the galleries and churches, from long ago. And marble. But I was alive, alive, of course I was alive. I was never a Christian, where did that come from?

MY REST WOULD END with the children coming home, Mom, Mom, they’d call, and then it was the afternoon at the pool, filled with their joy and shrieks, the dogs barking and barking, with them.

I’ve told you about my mornings, when I’d go down to my studio. Across the grass, past the pool, down the small hill, through the trees, and then . . . my own, my very own, stone room. The worn step, a creak of my door: and in. I’d put on my shirt, I had a shirt on a hook, spattered with years and years of old paint and smelling of turpentine and oil. I’d button it up as I looked around — the familiar dust motes, the familiar dimness. The space, it was enough space. Mine. And then: my canvas. It always surprised me when I found it, it always looked different to how I’d imagined it, in my dreams. Something different in its shading, some brightness missing, or perhaps some new illumination within it; some line subtly moved. I don’t know. Sometimes this enraged me. I’d sit on my chair then and think for a while, think about what I should do, what I must do. And then I’d try again. Again.