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It was January, in Dublin. They must have come from a hothouse. He half-peeled an orange so that the peel, still attached, curled out across white linen, dark wood. He carried the plaster cast of a beautiful veiled woman from a collection of such things on shelves in another corner, set this lady among the fruit, and bade us draw.
    As he paced about the room, watching us begin, he intoned, ‘“She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.” Do you know what that means, young ladies? It means she is dark and warm as the scented air of a summer evening in Italy. Put that into your drawing, mesdemoiselles —all the promise of summer, although we are in chilly Dublin, your young fingers are purple with chilblains, and she only a cold plaster bust.’
    Later, when he came to look over my shoulder, he asked, ‘A new girl?’
    ‘Harriet Pym, sir.’
    He used the pencil he was carrying to lift a long lock of my hair, and said, ‘Harriet the Red.’ An exaggeration: my hair was reddish brown. ‘Are you fiery, Harriet? Aflame with the desire to draw?’
    I looked at him. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
    There are many opportunities to lean close together to study drawings, many times when the eyes of student and teacher meet, when the hot cheek of one feels the warm breath of the other. I was twelve at that first meeting; Tom was thirty-three, though he could have passed for ten years younger. He taught me chiaroscuro, perspective, and to measure faces—and many things besides. He kissed me behind a tree in St Stephen’s Green on a sketching expedition when I was fifteen, and I knew I would die if I had to live without him. I wrote to him for a year after we were separated, letters of misery and burning passion. We eloped when I was seventeen.
    There followed great troubles, but my father was brought to accept the marriage at last, and Tom and I went to the continent on a six-month wedding journey. It was 1820 and I was young and full of joy. Nothing could touch me: no crowded stifling carriages, no bleak wet days in flea-ridden inns, no greasy dinners of horse meat and black bread. Tom knew the poetry of each place, the paintings to see, the churches, palaces, the hill towns and fêtes. He was my teacher and sage, lover and friend, and I was blissfully happy. I discovered Paris, Florence and Geneva with lean wolfish Tom, all my very own, on days when the sky was blue as heaven and the nights were warm and full of promise. We were in Aix-en-Provence when he told me, greatly amused, that he had not a particle of Russian in him. He was the son of an Irish woman and a Liverpool Army man, both long dead. He had been brought up among cousins in a carpenter’s yard in Putney. I did not care; I was happy.
    Portraits were Tom’s forte in those days, and the first shadow came when we returned to London and discovered the demand for these greatly diminished. With the war over, Captains and Admirals no longer needed to leave their likenesses at home for their loved ones—and money was short. Tom began then to paint grand Biblical scenes, gradually becoming possessed by them, spending less and less time on portraits.
    During the next seven years I had three miscarriages and bore two infants. Both lived only a few weeks. I recovered easily in body, andyet the doctor said I could never, now, bear children. People remarked on how well I looked, and I strove to be cheerful for Tom’s sake, but I felt always veiled in a kind of dark trance, half absent from myself and the world. Work was a solace, but it was a time of mourning; my father was drowned in the Mediterranean in the year ’27. During all these years I struggled to be calm. Steady observation and detachment being habits drawing promotes in any case, I schooled myself to be like my father: measured, cool; since Tom, I now saw, was like Nina: hot-blooded, impatient, vigorous. These lessons of self-restraint and patience stood me in good stead in the later years