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to the painting: ‘Mimi!’ When was she going to give him her sign? Sometimes she could be so stubborn! As when he had pleaded and pleaded with her to cover the whole thing up with him, not to make him do it, to live happily together for the rest of their lives. Certainly he had never wanted it to end as it had. For a moment then he half wondered if he mightn’t confess the whole business to Forbes. Hear the man tell him that it was all quite understandable. He had acted as anybody would.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ Forbes was saying. ‘I didn’t realise.’
    They stood there. The painting was irksomely frozen in its exact resemblance. Morris felt Forbes might be becoming impatient. To spin it out, he asked: ‘Did he use a model, do you think? I mean, was there a real flesh-and-blood girl?’
    â€˜Lippi? Well, yes, some of the painters did, for a basic anatomic outline. Though the result was highly idealised of course.’
    Of course nothing, Morris thought. It was the spitting image.
    'Funny thing about Lippi,’ Forbes now remarked, apparently trying to take his young friend’s mind off things, ‘although he was a monk and did all these devotional paintings, he then went and abducted a nun and later married her.’
    â€˜Abducted?’ Morris said aghast.
    â€˜So the story goes.’
    â€˜He abducted her and she was his model?’
    â€˜Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. But I suppose she could have been.’
    â€˜A nun?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    As Mimi too had been so desperately Catholic! No sooner had he taken all this in than Morris thought it extraordinary that the usually sensitive Forbes had not noticed the obvious parallels. As if he himself had painted her virgin portrait, then married her, which must be a kind of death for a nun. Or not? His mind seemed about to boil. Still the wry smile wouldn’t move.
    Had she really loved him? Or was it just a ploy to get away from home? Her convent.
    â€˜There’s a rather jolly poem about the fellow, by Browning, apologising for his lusty instincts,’ Forbes went on. ‘Somewhat overpraised by Ruskin.’
    Quite suddenly Morris had had enough. He had stood there ten minutes and more. He must be going out of his mind, waiting for signs. And if he wasn’t, then he was being snubbed. That knowing smile. Damn her! She was only a girl in the end. Madonna or no. He swung round, took Forbes by the arm and headed for the door. ‘My stomach,’ he complained. ‘I can’t believe this.’
    The voice called exactly as they crossed the threshold into the Botticelli Room. Morris froze. Forbes was clearly afraid his young friend might be going to faint, or vomit, and tried to put a supporting arm round him. Morris turned his head. The room was filling up with a gaggle of schoolchildren, calling to each other in shrill tones. But it was definitely his own name he had heard, and with that unmistakable inflection: ‘Morri!’ Nobody else had ever called him Morri. The great brown eyes stared across the room. Morris raised a hand to his lips, blew a kiss, turned and, hardly aware that Forbes’s arm was still round his shoulder, stumbled down the stairs.
    In the car he would have liked to have spoken to her on the telephone, but that was clearly impossible in Forbes’s presence. The old man wanted to stop for lunch, but warned that he had forgotten his wallet. Morris felt sorry to see his noble friend reduced to this sort of pathetic scrounging and gallantly insisted they order the most expensive dishes on the menu, his stomach-ache having miraculously disappeared. Afterwards, on the way back, despite his growing impatience to be alone, he generously told Forbes that if ever he needed a loan to tide him over between pensions, he need only ask. Forbes accepted a couple of hundred thousand.
    â€˜I know it sounds crazy,’ Morris went on, ‘but do you think it might ever