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Mr Sims.’
    ‘Good afternoon, Madame Kaufman.’
    No nonsense about calling her Anna. She might have thought . . . she might have presumed. And the title ‘Madame’ kept the right sense of proportion between them. She was really very useful. She cleaned the studio - they always alluded to his room as the studio - and his paintbrushes, and tore up fresh strips of rag every day, and as soon as he arrived she had a cup of tea for him, not like the stew they used to brew in the office, but piping hot. And the boy . . . the boy had become quite appealing. Fenton had felt more tolerant about him as soon as he had finished the first portrait. It was as though the boy existed anew through him. He was Fenton’s creation.
    It was now midsummer, and Fenton had painted his portrait many times. The child continued to call him Da. But the boy was not the only model. He had painted the mother too. And this was more satisfying still. It gave Fenton a tremendous sense of power to put the woman upon canvas. It was not her eyes, her features, her colouring - heavens above, she had little enough colouring! - but somehow her shape: the fact that the bulk of a live person, and that person a woman, could be transmuted by him upon a blank canvas. It did not matter if what he drew and painted bore no resemblance to a woman from Austria called Anna Kaufman.That was not the point. Naturally the silly soul expected some sort of chocolate-box representation the first time she acted as his model. He had soon shut her up, though.
    ‘Do you really see me like that?’ she asked, disconsolate.
    ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ he said.
    ‘It’s . . . it’s just that . . . you make my mouth like a big fish ready to swallow, Mr Sims.’
    ‘A fish? What utter nonsense!’ He supposed she wanted a cupid’s bow. ‘The trouble with you is that you’re never satisfied. You’re no different from any other woman.’
    He began mixing his colours angrily. She had no right to criticize his work.
    ‘It’s not kind of you to say that, Mr Sims,’ she said after a moment or two. ‘I am very satisfied with the five pounds that you give me every week.’
    ‘I was not talking about money,’ he said.
    ‘What were you talking about, then?’
    He turned back to the canvas, and put just the faintest touch of rose upon the flesh part of the arm.‘What was I talking about?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Women, wasn’t it? I really don’t know. And I’ve told you not to interrupt.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Mr Sims.’
    That’s right, he thought. Stay put. Keep your place. If there was one thing he could not stand it was a woman who argued, a woman who was self-assertive, a woman who nagged, a woman who stood upon her rights. Because of course they were not made for that.They were intended by their Creator to be pliable, and accommodating, and gentle, and meek. The trouble was that they were so seldom like that in reality. It was only in the imagination, or glimpsed in passing or behind a window, or leaning from a balcony abroad, or from the frame of a picture, or from a canvas like the one before him now - he changed from one brush to another, he was getting quite dexterous at this - that a woman had any meaning, any reality. And then to go and tell him that he had given her a mouth like a fish . . .
    ‘When I was younger,’ he said aloud, ‘I had so much ambition.’
    ‘To be a great painter?’ she asked.
    ‘Why, no . . . not particularly that,’ he answered,‘but to become great. To be famous. To achieve something outstanding.’
    ‘There’s still time, Mr Sims,’ she said.
    ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps . . .’ The skin should not be rose, it should be olive, a warm olive. Edna’s father had been the trouble, really, with his endless criticizing of the way they lived. Fenton had never done anything right from the moment they became engaged: the old man was always carping, always finding fault. ‘Go and live abroad?’ he had exclaimed.‘You