‘In here’ – he gestures at the room – ‘you will watch demonstrations, but more importantly and more commonly, you will stand alongside your tutor, either myself or Norman, my deputy, and watch us work, gradually practising aspects of the procedure yourselves. Occasionally, you will go out to homes or hospitals to accompany embalmers, but the bulk of your work will be in here.’ He pauses and looks in turn at each of them, enjoying, William thinks, the assumed gravity of the moment. ‘And if you work hard and pay attention, what you learn here over the next twelve months will turn you into some of the best embalmers in Europe.’

Ray’s eyes dart all over the room. For William, Simon and Roger, nothing in here is new; the embalming tables, the trolleys with buckets and drainage trays, the cadaver. They will all have had access to mortuaries and chapels of rest from an early age. In fact, William will have been a relative latecomer at fourteen.

Arthur walks towards the door, beckoning them to follow. In the far corner of the adjacent, smaller room are two stacks of six stretchers, and embedded in the wall, cool storage chambers.

‘These are actually an ex-air raid precaution.’ Arthur lays his hand on the basic-looking steel frames, each with five wooden slats, painted white, running lengthways. On each corner is a metal bracket which enables them to be stacked. ‘Simple, but they do the job. Bodies are stored here, and taken through to the demonstration room next door.’

William wishes he felt kinder, more generous towards Ray, but being near him raises unease in himself, an unease that takes him back further than his first weeks with Robert, when he stood next to his first cadaver with his uncle’s hand on his shoulder. What bothers him today, glancing every now and then at Ray, is the knowledge that he, eight years ago, and almost dizzy with the unfamiliarity of it all, was just as much of an oddball himself. And who knows what those four years in Cambridge would have been like had he not been rescued so early and so completely by Martin and his friendship, which both cocooned him and propelled him out into chorister life. He’s not unaware how perverse it is, that rather than wanting to offer the same kind of rescue to Ray, to go out of his way to ease his passage into a new world, William resents Ray for the mirror he presents him with. Well-practised, William swats the image of Martin from his mind.