Those were the words Mr Bristol used when the big day came and he was invited to have first sight of my mother’s finished portrait. They were the same words he used with his gentlemen friends when their deals worked out, or their law cases were won. For weeks, Mr Hickey had become coy about his work, as we had been warned he would. “He’ll turn it to the wall so you cannot peek, and he will become very short if you ask him anything about it,” Miss Hickey told me. “You must humour him, for that is his way always, to wish to surprise the patron above all. And to be honest, Anila, quite apart from that, I think you make him nervous with the questions you ask.” That was true. He had taken to calling me “that little peppercorn”, though he was just as generous as before with paper and pens for me, and he would always ask to see what I had been drawing, after my mother stood up from her sofa and stretched her arms. But now these conversations came only after he had carefully turned the painting away from our view.
