And then after all that fuss of anticipation she didn’t much like the paintings. They bored her: that possibility hadn’t occurred to her, it really was a surprise. There was no danger of her shedding tears. It wasn’t that she thought they were false or pretentious exactly: she could imagine the very authentic journey the artist had made towards these big pale canvases with their silver and grey and wheat colours, their painstaking exact grids and geometries, fine as quilting. In pursuit of some truth of the spirit she had refined away every intrusion of ugly life: all the dirty marks it made, all its aggression and banally literal languages. There were some beautiful effects of paint: Christine liked one work in particular, where the acrylic wash had run between grey stripes into denser forms, like rain clouds. But the end result, nonetheless, seemed to her puritanical, and too wholesome and homespun: even sentimental, in its conviction of the possibility of purity, like a sentimental mysticism. You had to be so vigilant, if you banished all obvious meanings from the front of your art, that they didn’t return unobserved by the back door.