‘Naughty,’ he reproved. ‘You will ruin my surprise.’
Pepper had envisaged the treat to be lunch at one of the city’s rooftop eateries, or perhaps a visit to a gallery or museum. Lisbon was famed for its cork, so perhaps they were on the way to source some of that? Or taste some Port? Josephine would enjoy that.
‘I think we are here,’ he said at last, coming to such an abrupt stop that Josephine almost walked right into him.
‘We are?’ Pepper took in the cracked wooden door with its sparse rinds of white paint.
Finn, who had been consulting his phone, looked up and nodded.
‘She said that it might be difficult to find.’
There was a large iron knocker on the door, as well as a buzzer set to the side, and Finn tried both. Pepper, who was a few steps behind him, took the opportunity to admire the breadth of his shoulders and the spun-gold sheen of his hair.
The woman who answered the door reminded Pepper starkly of herself. Her skirt was long and flowing, the blouse above it dotted with flowers, and her hair, which was dark and shiny like treacle, was piled up and held in place with a slim paintbrush of the kind a child might use. She was wearing an ink-stained apron and enough metal bangles to topple a boat.
After they had all greeted each other with a chorus of olás and como estás, the woman beckoned them in and along a dark hallway that opened out into a neat paved garden. Pepper saw long wooden tables piled with paints, blank tiles, pots of beads, glue and scissors. There were jam jars full of pencils, pens and brushes, stacks of coloured paper and cardboard pinned down with large shells and, on a chair that had been pushed into a far corner, a large rubbish sack full of what looked to be feathers.
Finn had somehow discovered the Lisbon equivalent of an Arts For All session.
The woman swept an arm around, breaking into clumsy English as she explained that they were welcome to use any materials they wanted, and that she would be around if they required any help. She didn’t appear to be as hands-on as Pepper herself generally would be, but the set-up was almost identical. And the three of them weren’t the first customers of the day, either – a gang of surly-faced teenage girls were gloomily sketching a bowl of fruit at one table, while a man with wild ginger hair was busy sculpting what looked to be a family of trolls out of clay at another.
‘Are you happy to stay?’ Finn asked, sounding less self-assured now that they were here. ‘She told me that she never gets time to create any art for herself,’ he added to Josephine. ‘So, I thought . . .’
He looked at Pepper.
‘We can go, if you want to?’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to feel under any pressure.’
‘Oh no,’ she hurried out. ‘This is lovely, so thoughtful, so sweet of you to be so clever – and so kind.’
She was babbling now as her mother sometimes did, desperate to reassure him. Finn had really listened to her; he had acted on what she told him. Pepper was so used to fulfilling her own needs – her independent streak born from years of being left to her own devices – that she had forgotten how nice it felt to be treated to something that she had not planned herself.
‘What shall we make?’ she asked, accepting an apron from the dark-haired host while Josephine fastened the ties on her own.
‘You told me last night that you like mosaics?’ Finn said. Then, when Pepper nodded, ‘OK then, that is what we should do.’
Josephine had opted to sculpt with the clay and set herself up on the bench alongside Pepper while Finn sat opposite. They each had a rectangular block of wood on the table in front of them and plastic tubs full of tiny coloured tiles arranged within reach. Finn insisted on erecting a propped-up cardboard barrier between them, so they would not be able to see what the other was creating. This suited Pepper, who knew almost immediately what she was going to make. Selecting a pencil from one of the jars, she quickly sketched an outline of her design straight onto the wood, then began picking out white, grey, pale blue and yellow tiles to cut. Finn thought for a while, then beamed as an idea came to him. Using one hand as a shield, he rifled through the nearest tub for his own materials with the other, raising a comedy eyebrow as Pepper pretended to sneak a look.
At home, she only ever worked with deafeningly loud music or the radio blasting in her ears, but here gentle jazz drifted across from a distant window. Birds twittered away out of sight, the teenage girls mumbled things to each other occasionally, and every so often, there was the sticky slap sound of watery hands against clay from either Josephine or the troll man. Other than that, it was quiet, and for once Pepper found the lack of noise soothing rather than distracting. Or maybe, it was Finn that soothed her? There was something so capable, so reassuring, and so calming about him, yet he had also made her howl with laughter as they talked last night. She felt switched on – alive in ways she had not felt for many years.
‘Making a mosaic is much harder than it looks,’ he said, after half an hour had passed. Pepper, whose well-practised hands were cutting, placing and gluing with easy speed, tutted in good humour as Finn sent a shard of red tile shooting across the table.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘cup your hand under the cutters before you snip, then all the pieces will fall into your open palm, see?’
Finn stood up so he could watch over the barrier, and Pepper only just hid her creation in time.
‘You make it look simple,’ he said. ‘I see now why you are a good teacher.’
‘Hardly!’ she argued, only to be told off by Josephine.
‘Pay no heed to her,’ she warned him. ‘I’m afraid this talented and wonderful young lady has a tendency to put herself down. She is immeasurably good at what she does, but she will never hear it, never admit it.’
Finn’s eyebrows knitted together as he frowned.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘If you are good at something, it makes sense to be proud – it is important.’
‘I get by,’ she said, then, before he had a chance to challenge her, ‘where did your interest in art come from, anyway?’
‘Mama used to take me to galleries when I was a child,’ he explained. ‘Much of the time, we lived close to the Army barracks, because of my father. And they were not always the best places. Mama was my best friend when I didn’t have any of my own, and we would play drawing games together, or make models, that kind of thing.’
‘What about your father?’ Pepper asked.
‘Ah, with Papa, it was always football,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Or cricket. Sometimes boxing. Always sport or fighting. My mother stopped putting my drawings on the wall, because he would take them down. He thought it was pointless to encourage me in something I was very bad at – which I was – but it felt unfair to me then. When he was sent abroad, or went away on Army exercise, those were the best times, because my pictures stayed up for weeks, even though they were terrible.’
‘You poor little mite,’ remarked Josephine.
‘That is sad,’ agreed Pepper, putting down the tweezers she had been using to nudge the smaller pieces of her mosaic into place.
Finn shrugged. ‘I was never that good at any of it,’ he said, trying for a laugh that came out as a sort of grunt. ‘Not the art or the sport, so neither Mama nor Papa won that battle in the end. I chose to study business and accounting at university, which was very stumpf – dull – but now I can look after the money side of my business. I don’t think I would be able to launch a website if I could not crunch the numbers.’