"It's a pity that you chose such a gloomy winter's day to visit," he continued. "The garden is spectacular in the summer when the sun is shining; not that I can take very much credit for its beauty. Lucjusz, Ania's husband, the lovely Ania who keeps my house spotless, is a rare treat; a gardener who is both supremely competent as well as being fairly priced. He is also a very able carpenter and builder and I have come to rely on him a lot since the major by-pass two years ago; I tire pretty easily nowadays and can no longer put the shelves up or paint the walls as I used to do. I only keep painting pictures now because I am driven to it, not out of any kind of choice."
"You make enough from your painting that you can afford to employ both a gardener and a housemaid?" She enquired. "My, my, how times have changed. Who would have thought, all those years ago, that you would make anything other than pocket change from your birds; not that you did not have talent to spare but you, yourself, used to moan about how you needed a 'proper' job if we were to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, however much you detested your job. It's strange, in a weird kind of way, because I only managed to find you from your writing, that book that you wrote about the year spent on the Dodecanese island working as a jobbing builder on that restoration project; I quite enjoyed the book. You mentioned nothing in it about painting, let alone that you earned a living from it; I found that out later when a friend, someone that I just happen to know really, mentioned that she had been to your exhibition last year on a whim and came away amazed that you could charge so much! It was good of you to provide a photograph of yourself in the catalogue; I might have doubted that it was really you otherwise. I'd recognize those ears from a hundred yards."
"I was not sensible enough in those days to write under a pseudonym," he said "I was too chuffed at seeing the work in print, a proper book, to worry overmuch about the embarrassment caused by writing under my real name. Not that I earned, still earn, very much from it; it barely covered the advance. Now it's just the odd hundred a year, three hundred in a good year. And the photograph was the gallery's idea, a tad more personal they said. I think that they were frightened that I might not turn up for the previews, ghastly events that they are; absolutely frightful, all that fawning and sycophancy over glasses of Chablis or Sancerre as if one were somehow significant or important, which of course I am not."
"Do you keep any paintings here?" She asked.
"A few, mostly things which, for a variety of reasons, are not for sale or unsalable; on the whole, I pretty much sell everything that I consider to be complete, finished to at least a modicum of my satisfaction. Why, would you like to see what I get up to now?"
She nodded and immediately rose from her stool, clutching the half full glass, as if she were a child eagerly anticipating a trip to a museum or the zoo. He waved her through the door but, on a whim, a fancy, guided her not upstairs to where the studio lay but into the laundry room where Rory was laying with her five sleeping pups. The low-sided, wooden box, lined with old feather pillows, which Lucjusz had made from discarded off-cuts of solid oak shelves, too costly to discard in the recycling centre, was large enough for the Red Setter to stretch out fully on her side, exposing the teats for her pups. The pups, eyes tightly closed, were nestled in a small ball of red-brown fur in the space between the bitch's foreleg and ribcage. As much as he detested anthropomorphism in all of its many guises, he could not help thinking that Rory was wearing a look of decidedly exhausted but smug satisfaction as if to say, 'you think that I am useless and an eejit but look at what I did all by myself this morning'.
Chani walked over to where Rory lay and gently stroked the dog's head.
"They're so, so adorable," she crooned. "How old are the puppies?"
"A few hours," he replied. "They were born around seven this morning. Perhaps somehow they knew that you were coming and decided to surprise and treat you." He smiled. "Come, let us leave her in peace now; she has had a very busy morning and needs her rest."
Leaving the door ajar, so that he could look in on the dog without disturbing her, Leo led Chani up the narrow and relatively steep staircase, so common in houses before building regulations and safety concerns forced a more gentle gradient on builders, and which dog-legged back on itself at the mid-point. On reaching the top, he turned right down a corridor which was in complete contrast to the narrow stairs, being a few inches over six feet wide throughout its length; framed photographs of hawks and falcons lined the wall in serried ranks of a mixture of power and malevolence. At the far end, two doors, spanning the width of the corridor, stood open, as he had left them; the gateway to his studio.
The room, which stretched from the front to the back of the house was a little over thirty feet in length and twenty feet wide. The room was orientated in a rough north-south direction; at the north end, multiple glazed French doors spanned almost the entire width of the room from floor to ceiling, they led onto the small balcony from which he had delivered his earlier speech; at the south facing end of room, were huge picture windows, hung with mildly opaque, ecru-coloured Roman blinds. Deep cupboards, plan chests and smaller drawers, lined the far side of the room, all topped with the kind of surface usually found in kitchens, inset, in the centre, with a small circular sink with one of those strange taps, like shower hoses; the floor was of varnished American oak, paler than its English counterpart, which the sunlight streaming into the room had bleached over a six foot stripe on the south side of the room. Five studio-style easels were scattered about the room, each carrying a large Masonite panel draped in rough linen to protect it from the light and accidental damage; artwork in varying stages of completion. A further easel, wildly different from the others, stood alone at the north end of room. Much more robustly made and bolted to the floor, it sported an array of metal 'goose-necks' emanating from the top, each terminated by a fluorescent tube, like some gorgon crowned with serpents. A swivel high backed typist's chair stood to one side together with a small table, mounted on casters. The table was strewn with all of the paraphernalia of painting; brushes, tubes of paint and retarder, jars filled with variously coloured water, palettes. Some sketch-books and photographs were neatly piled to one side.
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