‘And Mrs Potts, our school cook, smokes over the food.’ He doesn’t tell her that he’s quite fond of Mrs Potts, and if he gets to the kitchen early enough she lets him watch her work.

Evelyn wipes her mouth with a napkin. ‘Oh dear,’ she murmurs, two worry lines at the bridge of her nose.

The waitress comes and refills Evelyn’s teacup. In less than two hours he will be saying goodbye to her until Christmas. His insides soften.

‘But she’s kind to me,’ he adds, ‘just not as good a cook as you.’ He reaches across his plate to touch her hand. The smell of egg yolk makes him feel full, and if he doesn’t keep his elbow high it will drag over his chips.

Her smile is back. ‘And?’ she says. ‘Anything else to tell me?’

He swallows a chip and looks at the length of gristle running through the ham on his plate. So she knows already.

‘Who told you?’

‘No one important, only your headmaster.’ She leans towards him. ‘I’m waiting to hear it from you.’

The headmaster’s always telling them they have to stand on their own feet now, look after themselves, but he’s been talking to his mother behind his back all along. His indignation is too weak though, her excitement, directed at him, too strong, and a smile sweeps his face. He gives himself up to the joy of having good news for someone completely on his side, whose happiness depends on nothing more than his own. Evelyn puts her cutlery down.

‘Come on, tell your mother how bloody marvellous her son is!’

‘Naughty!’ He wags his finger at her and she laughs.

The clatter of voices, the chink and scrape of cutlery, the waitresses in their black and white uniforms, all recede. Him and her, back in their bubble. He tells her – even though she already knows – that because Martin was sick, he sang a solo and did so well that Phillip wanted him in the choir by half-term, helped by Porter’s voice breaking.

‘So from next week, I’ll be sitting with the choristers, next to Martin.’

Evelyn has picked up her cutlery and is struggling to chew her food because of the smile splitting her face. William wants to keep her happy.

‘At practice yesterday, Phillip asked me to sing on my own and afterwards he said, “That’s the sound I want, boys! Sing like that.”’

And it is wonderful that those words, the same words that brought a brief but thick silence over the choir, now make his mother clap her hands and laugh. ‘I knew it! Your Uncle Robert can put that in his pipe and smoke it. You’re headed for the auditorium, William, not the gloomy funeral business!’