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you’d say I was sentimental. If I said “rarely” you’d say I was cold. It’s hard to answer with a simple yes or no. But I do fall in love from time to time.’ He reached to the table and opened a book so that a photograph of his daughter Mandy fell out. Jones picked it up. ‘I’m in love with her at the moment,’ said Handley, snapping it back between the covers before Jones could twig the similarity of feature. ‘But I don’t see what it has to do with me as a painter.’
    â€˜I was just curious.’
    â€˜Anything else?’ Handley wanted to know.
    â€˜What about theories?’
    He closed one eye, and farted. ‘Theories?’
    â€˜Regarding art – painting.’
    â€˜ You can fart as well – if you want to. Liberty Hall. I know it’s catching. A theory is only a way of explaining how your art died. I never use ’em.’
    Jones was exasperated, needed a break. ‘Do you mind if I go to your john?’
    â€˜Down the stairs and second on the right.’ Handley wondered how someone like Russell Jones had already become acquainted with his brother John.
    He was at the door: ‘It’s all right. I’ll find it.’ Handley shrugged, turned to his painting. The head-down fox was falling back to earth after its trip to the sky, a visit to the foxgods who forthwith sent him speeding to the nether world, his life one long and agonising vacillation between air and fire, space and boiling rock, vulpine trap into which he had by chance of birth been driven. The blazing circular limits of the sun surrounded his existence, and yet at the same time the eternal powerhouse of his drive showed him him as the lit-up centre of Handley’s wide-scope world immediately forgotten as he plunged back in.
    The stairs were narrow, but Jones found his way to the wider landing of the lower floor. A girl was pushing a sweeping brush ineffectually around dark corners. He thought of trying to kiss her, but his nerve for it wasn’t in the right place this morning. Opening the second door without hesitation, he found it didn’t give into a lavatory at all, but a normal-sized blind-drawn room flooded by brilliant electric light. Much space was taken by racks of wireless receivers and transmitters, wavemeters and goniometers, speakers and microphones. At a table beside it sat a bald, middle-aged man wearing earphones and with hands busy at a morse key. On being suddenly disturbed he sprang up, careful to unplug the earphones, lifted a heavy service revolver and set its spout towards Jones. ‘Get out!’ he cried hoarsely, ‘Get out!’ – an unforgettable picture.
    The door had closed behind Jones who, being so certain he was in the right room, had advanced a good way into it before realizing the mistake which now seemed set for ludicrous and terrible proportions as this pop-eyed sallow-faced maniac came for him.
    The door seemed to have locked itself: ‘I can’t get out. I can’t.’ Though unaccustomed to shouting, Jones did so now. It somehow humanised him, reduced the tension in the room to one of ordinary pathetic impotence, and at the panic-pitched sound of it the man who threatened him put down the gun, and a charming smile spread over his face.
    The door knocked Jones in the back, and he stepped aside, forgetting the painful jolt in anticipation of the next surprise assault. The great menace was still the man with the earphones hanging round his neck like a stethoscope. He gave a fixed and fearful smile as if, having come from Italy to some bruto northern court in the Middle Ages, he was demonstrating it as a new invention for the human face – a subtle yet novel expression that could be used by anyone not absolutely perishing of melancholy, and that was now sweeping the Mediterranean world.
    â€˜John,’ Handley said, ‘sit down and get back to work.’ Smile drained, John revealed a