‘What do you think? It seemed to me that everything I wanted was inside this house. I’d have lived here if I could. But she was very clever. Only one hour every other day, so that the gilt never wore off the gingerbread. She never forced me to do anything too long. I never tired of anything. I can see now what a lot of self-restraint she must have used because by nature she was a slave-driver.’ He paused, tracing back his memories. ‘Gosh!’ he said suddenly, ‘what a nasty little bit of work I must have been.’

‘Why?’

‘Sucking up to her. Wallowing in second-rate ideas about second-rate music. Telling her what Tchaikovsky made me feel like and slobbering out “Chanson Triste” on the Bechstein with plenty of soul and wrong notes. Kidding myself as well as her that I didn’t like the Donkey Serenade.’

‘At the age of ten?’ Alleyn murmured incredulously

‘Up to thirteen. I used to write poems, too, all about nature and high ideals. “We must be nothing weak, valleys and hills are ours, from the last lone rocky peak to where the rata flowers.” I set that one to music: “Tiddely tum te tum. Tiddely tum te-te” and wrote it all out and gave it to her for Christmas with a lovely picture in water colour under the dedication. Gosh, I was awful.’

‘Well,’ said Alleyn peaceably, ‘you certainly seem to have been a full-sized enfant prodigé. At thirteen you went to boarding-school, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. At her expense. I was hell-bent on it, of course.’

‘Was it a success?’ Alleyn asked, and to his surprise Cliff said: ‘Not bad. I don’t approve of the system, of course. Education ought to be the business of the state; not of a lot of desiccated failures whose real object is to bolster up class consciousness. The teaching on the whole was merely comic, but there were one or two exceptions.’ He saw Alleyn raise an eyebrow and reddened. ‘I suppose you’re thinking I’m an insufferable young puppy, aren’t you?’

‘I’m merely reminding myself rather strenuously that you are probably giving me an honest answer and that you are not yet eighteen. But do go on. Why, after all, was it not so bad?’