He saw the clock tower. Did it stand out like a sore thumb today, like a conifer in suburbia?

In a crumpled white napkin he saw Banno’s face – his receding hairline, his longish nose. Was there sadness in the face? Tris closed his eyes, and when he opened them he could still see the face.

Walking down Galileo Court, Sam saw the plate-glass library frontage and went in.

Tris followed him inside. There were a few people there, but like always, the place had a hollow feel. Johnny’s would never have that warm hubbub of a stylish café.

He stopped in at Frank’s. The walls were hung with paintings of the English flag. Some were realistic, almost photographic, but a few looked like they were rippling in the breeze and others were torn and tattered and not red, white and blue any more, as if they’d been shredded in battle. It all looked more artistic than patriotic.

He’d once read about a paranoid Roman emperor whose daily walks were in a gallery lined with polished moonstone that reflected everything behind him. For himself, Tris wished he just had a rear-view mirror… He did like looking back, as if he’d just seen the Lone Ranger and was thinking ‘Who was that masked man?’

She tried to think of a colour that had looked and sounded new when it first came out. Tiffany Blue, from a hundred years before. And there were those colours that caught people’s attention with their distinctiveness, like the Le Creuset orange.

She went to the back room and opened the door to the sudden sharp scent of her work – paint and oil. Her colour wheel – yellow at the top these days, before it moved into green at two o’clock and blue at four – hung on the wall…

She had an image in her mind, of their house on a hill – a pure, clean white gazebo, neatly supported by four perfect pillars – and they’d emerged, spotless and tidy, to drive the world crazy with the exuberance of their songs…

She looked down at the floor and saw stripes of prismatic colour that had caught the late-morning light, the day’s first bright sighting always delighting and surprising her.

Was she imagining it? No. She didn’t know where it had come from, but it was there: a hint of something that looked almost metallic, that was the colour of gold. Gold! Metal, to make the mix sparkle? Like metal-flake paint on cars or like that drum kit I saw?

A lustrous brown? It didn’t make sense. Brown was the colour of figs, of Tootsie Rolls. And if a lustrous brown could be created, someone would have done it by now. Joshua Reynolds. Hadn’t he made a lustrous brown from asphaltum – ‘Jews’ pitch’ – bitumen from the bottom of the Dead Sea? And what about the Pre-Raphaelites’ mummy brown – made from ground-up Egyptian mummies?