CHAPTER SEVEN
REPETITION
Despite the elegant design of the house with its clinker bricks and high-pitched roof, Harriet preferred the studio. Situated at the end of the back garden, the studio hunkered in a grotto of tree ferns and soft grasses in the dappled shade of two golden elms, the sturdy trunks of three mountain ash standing like stalwarts. Clad in flitches of ash, with a tiled roof, and casement windows in the south and west facing walls painted a glossy black, the building had an English farmyard charm. Formerly a wood-turner’s workshop, inside, the concrete floor was speckled with linseed oil and, since she had taken possession, paint. A long and high bench lined the back wall, and where once chisels and clamps and saws had lived, the accoutrements of the artist—tins and tubes
