A short story about one of the characters in The Various Flavours of Coffee. In one draft, a number of disparate voices like this one formed part of the book’s final section. 

Woman, naked

"My name is Harry Pakenham, R.A. For many years I have leased a studio on Albion Terrace, in the tangle of streets immediately north of Chelsea Embankment. My studio has large, private windows which face north, and there are doors big enough to allow my canvases to be taken in and out – I hate to make a canvas smaller than it needs to be: the big ones sell much better. There is a fire, to keep my models warm in winter when cold fogs drift up from the river; a couple of rooms where I sleep and eat, and an attic where I store my things. Other than that, the studio itself has little to recommend it. But there are some advantages to being in an area that is, shall we say, less than grand. One can have adventures here.

I am no writer. Even in my pictures I do not tell stories – my work has been compared to the Brotherhood of the Pre-Raphaelites, although unlike them I have no taste for all that quasi-religious claptrap. But one thing I learnt early on, and that is that if you want to paint a naked woman, and have someone respectable pay you for the painting, you had better call her an allegory. So that is what I do – not all the time: much of my work is commissioned, portraits of aldermen and headmasters and other minor dignitaries, correct down to the last whisker; landscapes that contrive to make muddy Hertfordshire estates look like misty Umbria, and so forth. But when I have a little time on my hands, I like to paint women – or perhaps I should say, I like to bed women, and then I paint the women who I bed. Well, you’ve got to do something while they’re sleeping, don’t you? Sometimes I do portraits of society women, and they generally like to keep their clothes on – at least while I'm painting the portrait. But sometimes they’re working women, happy to take off their clothes for a shilling a day. If I like the look of them, I generally bed them. It is quite astonishing, really, how many of a woman’s other inhibitions are loosened when she undoes her gown for a painter. Myself, I put it down to the boredom – posing is tedious work. But there is also something in every woman which responds to being looked at – I honestly do not believe there is any female who is not pleased by the fact that you want to paint her, and excited by the attention..."

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