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feathers and furs…. He was open-minded enough, God knew, but they had disgusted him. It was madness for Tessa Mandeville to call his paintings “junk,” and what was her other word? “Obscene.” Those others were truly obscene.
    He walked round, studying each one. Even at this late stage he liked to make sure there were minute differences between each copy of the same painting, slight variations in the curls on the weeping boy’s head, for example. Tears glistened on the round pink cheeks, but in some versions there were three tears on the left cheek and in others four. Lady from Thailand was again proving the top seller. It was the custom of his agents to attach red stickers to paintings that had been sold—“as at a real private view,” he had been told was Tessa Mandeville’s comment. What was unreal about his sales no one had specified.
    All four copies of Lady from Thailand were sold, and they were up in the seventy-pound range. He asked one of the girls if she was taking orders for that particular painting and she said she was, she had already taken twelve, it was the most popular. Guy could understand why. The girl in the painting was very young, fifteen or sixteen, and very innocent-looking. But she was sexy too, with full, gleaming lips and big, shining doe eyes, and the gold-embroidered bodice she wore parted to show, between its braiding and the gold-and-jewelled necklaces she wore, the tops of her smooth young breasts. She seemed to gaze back into the eyes of the viewer with a look that was winsome yet pleading, shy yet provocative.
    Somewhere the original of that girl must exist, for all the paintings were based on photographs. Literally and actually based on photographs which, printed in a pale over-exposed version onto plasterboard, were imported by Guy in quantity from Taiwan. They were then painted over according to a prescribed method by his workers at the factory in Isleworth.
    When Guy, explaining his new business to members of Leonora’s family, had said that many of his employees would be art-school graduates, Tessa Mandeville had actually shuddered and said that made things worse.
    “They’re glad of the work, I can tell you,” he had said.
    “They’d do better to go on the streets,” said Tessa. “Better get themselves a beat outside King’s Cross Station.”
    What did she know about it? She had always had someone to keep her and give her a house to live in and money to save the whales and stop the acid rain and a studio where she could mess about with her paints. She didn’t have a clue what it meant to need a job. He would have liked to say that but he couldn’t because he had to keep on selling himself to those people, present himself as worthy to pay court to Leonora. The funny thing was—if such things were funny—that he had come along there, to some hotel it was where they were celebrating Leonora’s birthday and the end of her teacher-training, with the aim in view of getting himself in good with them all by indicating his abandonment of a life of fringe-crime and explaining his new career as a respectable businessman.
    As he looked at the paintings, the Thai girl and the weeping boy, The Old Millstream and the twin Persian kittens, he reflected that that particular evening had marked another watershed in the decline of his relationship with Leonora. It was true that by that time she had ceased altogether to sleep with him, but though that had naturally bothered him, it was not his major concern. She had once told him she thought it a bad idea for a girl to be on the pill for more than, say, four years at a stretch. While she was studying for her degree she would be afraid of becoming pregnant. He would, of course, have married her like a shot whenever she wanted it, chance would have been a wonderful thing, but nevertheless he understood she wanted to complete her studies. Then she had been away so much, and though he had phoned her every day, they hadn’t met for