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Paris. One colour, I told him: I told him he had to believe that there were twelve, some sort of fiction, so that he could go on painting. But I know that all art is based on a convention, a fiction between the artist and his public’
    Emily, much surprised, said, ‘Well, I’m fascinated. But who started it?’
    Mrs Browne looked ahead of her, over the ship’s keel—they were aft and almost under the covered deck. She said, ‘It may have a social use. Look at all these artists and writers employed now by the Government. Those artists are glad to have a weekly cheque and they do what they are told to do. They never wanted to starve in Greenwich Village, trying to get ideas that would sell. They’re glad to get into organised society. Fantasy has no social value.’
    ‘Well, that’s terrific,’ said Emily ‘but just the same, society prizes its artists: it doesn’t want them to go and bake bricks. There’s Shostakovich for example: he’s original and he’s also accepted at home and abroad; and what about Paul Robeson’s singing? That’s not a convention. Everyone recognises he’s a great.’
    ‘Artists like that are an accident,’ said Mrs Browne, ‘society is organised without any relation to them: and could go on without them. They’re not necessary. You can’t base a theory on accidents.’
    ‘But if they see ahead? If they belong to a convention not yet made?’
    ‘That is impossible,’ said Mrs Browne firmly, ‘no one invents anything: it is there, made by the people; there is no room for individuals—an artist should interpret.’
    ‘You’re a socialist?’ said Emily, quite fuddled by the woman.
    Yes. Mrs Browne, born in America, was of Russian parentage and was for the Russian revolution; always had been since the great day in 1917 when the news came over and people like her parents rushed out into the streets and cried, ‘Fonya Ganuf, Fonya Ganuf is done for!’ Fonya Ganuf, she explained, was the word in the old country, Russia, for the detested Russian State: Fonya, a diminutive for ‘Ivan’, Ganuf ‘the thief’. Yes, they had all been forced to be rebels, even revolutionists of a sort, their conditions in Russia were too hard.
    She was going to Paris for a few days and was to wait for her husband, Walter Browne, now working in a small private bank in London. He would take a vacation and join her in Paris. Mrs Browne slowly tore off fragments of ideas, all of them segments of iron, ready for use on the barricades. Yet she seemed stodgy, conservative, prudish. Perhaps she was not; perhaps that was a Russian manner. She and her husband, she said, saw through the New Deal, a palliative. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hailed as saviour, was the friend of big business, though Wall Street frowned on him. Wall Street could not sit at table with a friend who talked democracy and admitted that big business had mismanaged. Such talk encouraged discontent, doubt, criticism.
    ‘So you and your husband are socialists—?’
    No, no: they were leftists—after a moment, she said, ‘Communists; we’re both communists.’
    Emily was shaken; and looked sideways at her companion. Now the thick, pale, almond lids dropped over her dark eyes, the long lashes rested on her pale cheeks. She may have been feigning sleep to end the conversation, once she had given her downright views. Perhaps she hated to talk; but the machinery was somehow set in motion against the will? Emily turned to her book, but the wind blew, the sun shone, voices drifted about; and she was drowsy.
    She went to look for the man from her home town. Jean-Marie was there. He had no deckchair and was leaning against the rail. They went to the bar. She said she felt guilty about her brother Arnold and Betty. Perhaps if it had been only her savings, they could have had the money; but she could not give them her prize-money.
    ‘Prize what for?’
    ‘Well, it’s a wonder I got it. I write anything. I was shocked to find out how easily you