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blanched.
    His father saw expense, and said so.
    “Mr. Lavery says I could get a scholarship. He says he’ll write letters for me. He wants to talk it over with you.”
    And thus Mr. Lavery’s cautiously floated proposal took shape, blossomed, generated much correspondence, the selection of a portfolio of Matt’s work and, eventually, a trip to London for Matt, his portfolio under his arm and many instructions from his parents and Mr. Lavery in an envelope in his pocket.
    He was amazed by the place—by its size, its dirt, its streaming impervious crowds of people—but he was too fraught about the task in hand to pay more than superficial attention. He must now expose his work to people who were accustomed only to the best. To do so felt both presumptuous and exhilarating; at one moment he was unbearably diffident, at another excitingly assured. “Just be yourself,” his parents had said, won over at last by Mr. Lavery and the contemplation of Matt’s evident promise. But who was he? A schoolboy from the sticks? An aspiring artist? Both. And also a person whom he sensed but still hardly recognized—a maturing self who had conviction and opinions and boundless determination. He would get this scholarship; he would go to London, he would be an artist, come what may.
    When the letter from the Grosvenor School came, and he read it out to the family, his mother sat stricken and speechless; the women of ill-repute were right there in the room now, leering. Matt’s father said, “Well done, son.” Bryony, impressed despite herself, looked at her schoolboy brother and decided that this was perhaps a person of some account. She recognized that art has a certain cachet, and realized with private chagrin that those drawings and paintings that Matt had from time to time allowed the family to see must, after all, be the real thing, or, at least, some eery accessory to the real thing. She gave Matt a kindly cuff on the shoulder, and said she hoped he wasn’t going to get all uppity now. His mother rallied, faced down those lurking women, and began to talk anxiously of clothes, equipment, and sheltered accommodation.
    Matt was by nature buoyant, but he now experienced a wild exhilaration, a sense that he had not before known, soaring above the exigencies of daily life. He could hardly believe his good fortune. And yet at the same time he knew that he had been right in that kernel of self-belief he had always had, that Mr. Lavery had been right in his support, and that he could join his peers in that imagined studio, knowing that he was as good as they were, and perhaps better than some. But, beyond and above all that, he savored the knowledge that, miraculously, his life was now on course. He was licensed to do exactly that which he wanted to do, for the next three years at least. After that—well, after that would be up to him, but for the foreseeable future he could spend each and every day doing what he liked best: he could draw, he could paint, he would learn wood engraving.
    All this came to pass, not as he had imagined it, partly because reality never conforms to expectations but also because he himself became a subtly different being. The London at which he had gawped in amazement on that first visit became a familiar element through which he moved with ease; he learned how to manipulate the city, how to live cheap, how to use it. And the art college itself, at first a bewildering experience of alien attitudes and assumptions, of astonishing license, of people who spoke differently, dressed differently, lived differently, became within months a natural habitat, and he a distant older relative of the boy who had arrived there, and had placed himself nervously before an easel on that first morning.
    Matt grew up. He shot through several years in each of the first months, or so it seemed. He felt as though he was some hatching insect, the dragonfly bursting free. He had friends, he had a mattress on the floor of a