Well, there it is: I didn’t choose to stop painting, long ago. I simply stopped, in the same mysterious way that as a small boy I started. I still had the skill, but the drive to do it went out of me when I went out of Addis Ababa, and with the drive that specialness that made my work interesting to anyone, including myself. In Ma Madden’s Teas and Biscuits, therefore, with Annie’s commission in my head, I expected the conversation she had begun inside me to come to an end. I gazed at the chandelier as I opened the book, held the Payne’s grey pencil in my fingers, and waited for nothing to happen.