The magic of champagne

The four portraits of four siblings that Catriona had painted from their photographs over four months were framed, hung and lit and ready for a viewing by the loving parents. That so much creative endeavour should succeed or fail at a glance made me terribly glad I wasn’t a painter. At the appointed hour of six o’clock, I was still in bed upstairs, but listening out, as anxious as she was. Then I heard the parents’ optimistic tattoo on the front door.

We needn’t have worried. I heard them spot their children hanging on the rock face, then their overjoyed exclamations at the interpretations and likenesses. She’d captured their two sons and two mile-and-a-quarters’ various characters brilliantly, they said. Glad and relieved for Catriona, I rose and gingerly descended the creaking wooden stairs, my cotton pyjama bottoms flapping around my spindle shanks, to plant a congratulatory smacker on her smiling lips.

‘You’ll stay for a glass of wine, won’t you?’ said Catriona. They said: ‘Well, actually the mother-in-law has agreed to have the saucepan lids tonight and this is the first evening we’ve had to ourselves since before Christmas. So yes, please.’ Catriona rammed the corkscrew into her last bottle of 2019 Louis Latour Pouilly-Fuissé and I put the kettle on for a cup of tea and lobbed a pine chunk on the fire. Then the four of us disposed ourselves in chairs for a cheery natter.

I’d lived with the vicissitudes of those child portraits, as I say, for four months. An upper lip might take Catriona three days, then she’d paint over it and try again. A jawline ditto. The struggle sometimes dispirited her. At every stage she asked for my impressions of the work in progress and she took my comments surprisingly seriously.