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By Root 1598 0

the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities – which we supply. And so we spread death everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough. Well, it is not enough for me. That face on the easel is the face of plunder and death, sir, it is the face of Europe in Africa. It is an unacceptable face to me, sir, and I cannot go on any longer painting it. I have come to the end of portraits, on this coast at least. A man can hold off the truth of things for purposes of making a living – that is legitimate, I suppose, though ignoble. But when the face is there, before your eyes … It cannot simply be expunged, d’you see, as if it had never existed, not when heart and mind have worked together to produce it.’

‘Heart and mind,’ Paris repeated, struck by this simple and unaffected yoking of the two. Once again he was aware of some essential ingenuousness in the painter, a quality of innocence that had survived the wandering and makeshift life. He encountered the transfixed and horrendous stare of the face in the portrait. Moonlight lay along the pallid temples, revived a gleam of avarice in the dead left eye.

‘Yes,’ the painter said, with the same eagerness. ‘To make a good likeness you must have heart and mind working together. But the heart comes first.’

‘The heart is a vital organ,’ Paris said, in his serious and slightly pedantic way. ‘But it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.’

‘I take an opposite view,’ Delblanc said excitedly. ‘No man will ever find virtue by the mind alone – to think so was the folly of the Greeks. This trade we are helping in our different ways – do you think it comes about through the dictates of the heart?’

‘Nor truly of the mind either, but greed can take that colouring, as can other vices.’

‘Yes, sir, and so our natural instincts are perverted. Do you think for a moment that men would enslave one another if they lived in a state of nature?’

‘Well, it is a large question,’ Paris said doubtfully. ‘And one that cannot be easily answered.’

‘You are right. Let us have some more brandy now, so that we can the better discuss it.’

Whether it was Delblanc’s precipitation of speech or his readiness to forget his troubles at the prospect of debate, Paris did not quite know, but there was something about this eagerness that moved him now with a mingled sense of comedy and pain. Quite suddenly, with that lonely urgency that comes at times to reticent natures, he wanted to entrust something to this man, so frank and unaffected, so unforced in his transitions from thought and sensation to speech. ‘We can discuss it if you like,’ he said, ‘but there is something I wanted to say before and didn’t. You spoke about the need to make a living and how it inclines us to evade the truth of things, but I have not even that excuse.’

‘But it is your livelihood, as I understand the matter. I suppose you do not offer your services free?’

‘I did not need to take my uncle’s offer,’ Paris said. ‘My uncle is the owner of the ship I am serving on. I could have gone to another part of England or to one of the colonies. I could have gone to America, where there is need for doctors.’

‘You needed to get away then?’

The gentle matter-of-factness of this brought a tightness to Paris’s throat that he had not anticipated. Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it; but he knew that he was set on a course here, in this room from which the moonlight was receding, leaving it darker, before a man he hardly knew and a face of death. ‘Yes,’ he said harshly, ‘I needed to get away, but I did not need to take a post on a slaveship, I did not need to use my profession, of which I was proud once, to certify people as fit for branding and chaining.’

‘I suppose you