Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say: ‘May I stand here and watch?’

I turned and found Cordelia.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if you don’t talk,’ and I worked on, oblivious of her, until the failing sun made me put up my brushes.

‘It must be lovely to be able to do that.’

I had forgotten she was there.

‘It is.’

I could not even now leave my picture, although the sun was down and the room fading to monochrome. I took it from the easel and held it up to the windows, put it back and lightened a shadow. Then, suddenly weary in head and eyes and back and arm, I give it up for the evening and turned to Cordelia.

She was now fifteen and had grown tall, nearly to her full height, in the last eighteen months. She had not the promise of Julia’s full quattrocento loveliness; there was a touch of Brideshead already in the length of her nose and high cheek-bone; she was in black, mourning for her mother.

‘I’m tired,’ I said.

‘I bet you are. Is it finished?’

‘Practically. I must go over it again tomorrow.’

‘D’you know it’s long past dinner time? There’s no one here to cook anything now. I only came up today, and didn’t realize how far the decay had gone. You wouldn’t like to take me out to dinner, would you?’

We left by the garden door, into the park, and walked in the twilight to the Ritz Grill.