The portrait bothered him. It was one of a series he had done over the past two or three years. All of the same woman, they were sad, mysterious; evocations of mood rather than of feature; of beauty by implication rather than definition. This was the largest canvas – three feet by four – that he had tackled for a long time and it had given him the most trouble.

He sat gnawing at the knuckle of his left thumb for several minutes before he glanced round for brush and palette. It was the colours that were wrong. She was too hazy; too indistinct. Her colouring needed to be more definite, her vivacity more pronounced. He stood close to the canvas, leaning forward intently, and stabbed at it with the brush. He had made her too beautiful, the bitch, too seductive. He ought to paint her as she was – a whore; a traitor; a cat on heat.

His tongue protruding a little from the corner of his mouth, he worked furiously at the painting, blocking in the face, shading the planes of the cheeks, sketching lips and eyes, touching in the line of the hair, his anger growing with every brushstroke.

It was a long time before he threw down the brush, wiping his hands carelessly on the front of his old, ragged sweater. He stood back and stared at his handiwork through narrowed eyes, aware that as the sun moved lower in the sky, slanting first across the estuary and then across the bleak winter woods, the light was changing once again and with it her face. He glared down at the palette he had slid onto his father’s desk, aware that the anger was leaving him as swiftly as it had come and wondering, not for the first time, where it came from.