In the open car whiffs of lilac and wallflower surfaced through the tyre-tarmac-petrol smells. Houses glimmered like lighted barges, Euclidean problems jostling against each other full of unsolved areas and unmeasured angles. After another hour in the studio while he had tried to continue the portrait, we had gone out to lunch at the Spanish Galleon, and then had gone aboard the Cutty Sark, whose magisterial masts dominated Greenwich. Afterward we had walked beside the river and sat for a time in the temporary sun on the soft sand where there was the notice which said Dangerous for Bathing. We had had dinner in Erith and had taken a roundabout way home. No more said about that five minutes in the studio but it lay in the back of our minds. It couldn’t be ignored. It didn’t have to be. Because I wasn’t in the least unhappy that it had occurred. And that made it perfectly clear that, unless I took some pretty drastic decision here and now, it would happen again even more unmanageably in the near future.
