Children don’t expect words to be used to create false trails. Words to Esme are plain and simple with no hidden codes, no duplicitous underlife. He thinks of the conversations with his wife and how little of what they said was without encryption.

I suspect nothing has more power to alienate one from the wellsprings of all one’s creative vitality than being trapped in a loveless marriage. Probably they are the people who no longer feel special, the unhappily married.

The trouble with painting though, with all art, is you can’t prove you’re better. It’s not like a hundred-yard sprint where there’s a piece of technology to indisputably grade the contestants. Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.

She turns to look down at the tiered vineyards and, beyond, the vignette of Florence in the valley as if scooped up on a spoon. Its domes and spires and rooftops appearing to float on a tide of unearthly mist as inviolate and inaccessible as a private longing.

It’s astonishing how much of our resilience resides is our routines, even in our things. I sometimes think every person’s chances of surviving this war will be largely how adaptable they are to change.

Often of late she has accused herself of being a hard woman. As if she will not suffer her soil to be raw and tender, will not submit to the vulnerability of the new green shoot.

She remembers once handing her father a flower she picked and how in the act of giving she experienced herself as that flower – the sticky stalk resin, the hard green shoots, the sheltered stamens and raw red anthers. She needed him to understand her no less than she needed to remain a mystery.

Freddie is now officially the enemy. His unauthorised presence in the city a tightrope along which he has to walk back and forth every day. The streets bristle with black shirted men carrying guns who believe themselves taller than they are. Everything he carries within himself becomes secret, something that gives off illegal light and heat inside him. Sometimes he feels like a shadow that glows with this light, this heat.

Every time he is unable to answer one of her questions he feels another theft of strength from his limbs.

Sometimes at night the only sound was the syncopated footfalls of a Nazi patrol stiffly marching past in their nailed boots. It was like the noise of a pitiless machine. The sound of those unseen boots created an abyss in the atmosphere that you felt yourself falling into. You can’t imagine how sinister it seemed that they marched in step like that when there was no one around to see them. They didn’t seem like human beings, more like programmed automatons.