Xander and I had been wrong about the hospital. The building was small but it looked recently whitewashed and the little garden in front of it was full of bright ferns and carefully tended roses. The reassuring smell of disinfectant blotted out their perfume as Marcel and I stretchered Xander through the little lobby into a busy waiting room. The nurse who examined him wore the whitest uniform imaginable, and had one of those little watches pinned to her top pocket. She told us there’d be a bit of a wait.

‘That’s fine,’ sighed Xander.

‘How long a wait?’ asked Amelia.

‘Maybe an hour and a half, two …’ said the nurse apologetically.

‘That’s inside NHS targets,’ Amelia replied.

The nurse had a warm smile but I could tell that she didn’t know what Amelia was on about.

Unusually, so could Amelia. ‘When I cracked my head on the side of the pool doing backstroke and needed twelve stitches, I had to wait in A & E at St Thomas in London for three hours and forty-nine minutes,’ she explained. This raised a smile in Xander, though the nurse remained none the wiser. A doctor would see Xander as promptly as possible, she confirmed as she left.

In fact an orderly whisked him off for an X-ray pretty quickly, which was just as well because it meant he wasn’t there when Amelia started thinking out loud about the trauma this hospital must have seen in recent years. Marcel appeared not to want to talk about it, but that rarely stops Amelia, and all it meant was that she delivered her monologue to me.