Harold Bodkin

Harold lives in a large house with Hilda and the indispensable butler Ponsonby, and he is so simple-minded and grateful for sympathy that Reggie finds him clay in his hands. Every evening at seven he retires to his old studio to gaze at his own amateur portrait of Amelia and think — briefly, since cocktails and Ponsonby's dinner schedule intervene. His innocent devotion to a dead wife, and his blindness to how it strains the living one, is the soft absurdity Reggie has come to exploit.