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inside curve of her arm.
    At home when Kit passed the fruit shop at the end of her street the men who worked there stopped talking: a pause like an indrawn breath, laughter and talk breaking out as she walked away: impossible to walk without feeling conscious of their eyes on her back. Scott’s look was not like that. If anything dissatisfied, passionless, it made her no more than a chair or table.
    â€˜You could be her,’ he said. He looked back at Treen: ‘Anna’s here?’
    Treen put on her pious face. ‘She couldn’t get away.’
    He said nothing to this. After a pause he laughed. ‘My God!
    Anna’s daughter.’
    â€˜Scott’s our artist,’ said Treen.
    Kit stepped back with a sense that she wanted air. She did not for a moment believe that she looked like her mother—that her mother had ever looked like her. She saw that he’d closed his sketchbook before he stood up.
    â€˜What were you drawing?’
    He leant towards her. ‘Strangers’ faces,’ he said, his voice conspiratorial. He nodded toward the woman at the next table, absorbed in her newspaper still.
    â€˜They don’t mind?’
    â€˜They don’t notice. Some do, they get angry. They think I’m stealing their souls.’ The last phrase he said in a thin high voice. ‘As if their faces were private property on the street.’ He spoke with mocking astonishment. Kit found herself smiling though in truth she was shocked that any stranger had the right to make and keep a picture of her face.
    â€˜Have you heard anything?’ said Treen. ‘When the funeral…’
    Scott stopped, one hand still raised in its gesture. Talking to Kit, he had forgotten Treen momentarily and yet so utterly that the shock of what she said ran through his body. For the first time the woman at the next table glanced around. After another moment Scott breathed out. ‘I’ve been looking at his photographs all morning. You must see them. Come up.’
    Treen turned to Kit. ‘Would you mind?’
    Scott had already gone ahead. There was a toyshop on the ground floor. Alongside it, a flight of stairs went up the outside of the building. Someone had cut a door into the wall there. The stairs, of soft half-rotted wood, made noises as Kit climbed. Improvised, haphazard— Conscious of Scott watching her, waiting for her on a deck the size of a landing, inwardly she despised her conciliatory smile. She was being Anna’s daughter for them. Not mine, she wanted to say: all this has nothing to do with me.
    Scott held the door open with elaborate courtesy. Kit stopped inside the room: easels, paint all over the table, stacked canvases, clothes and rags piled in the corner; the smell of turpentine: a room identical to all the rooms she’d had to wait in while her mother talked to one artist or another. The feeling of recognition was strange, as though she had stepped not into a room but back into her childhood: here, Scott and Treen were out of place.
    He walked to his table. ‘So much life in them,’ he said. Photographs were spread out there and in neat rows on the floor. From behind, his neck and head made a column.
    â€˜Such a waste,’ breathed Treen, beside him. She had brushed outonly the front of her hair. It kinked in at the back where she had slept. ‘I can’t understand it.’
    â€˜That father,’ said Scott. ‘I can’t—’ He picked up one of the photographs. ‘I’m going to put these in a show. And his paintings.’
    â€˜Well…’ said Treen. And then, ‘Poor Rosemary.’
    Their grief together was strange. It closed them in. She had no reason to be here, except that they had brought her. Now, seeing them turn their backs, she felt herself to be nowhere. Her hand on the arm of her chair, that freckle on the back of it: she remembered primary school, holding her two hands up to her face. That