‘It’ll really work better if you just give in,’ Simon says. ‘Jonalyn runs a tight ship.’

‘I do,’ she says. ‘It’s better.’

She pours us each a glass, then gets back to putting the plates away.

The ground floor of the house is a single room, with an open kitchen, dining and lounge, and windows on all sides. Against the far wall, beyond the dining table, are two old red doors, a pair. They’re each semicircular, meeting at the diameter, and set in black-and-gilt carved frames that act as a square to the red circle. They came from a restaurant once owned by Faye’s family, the Lam family, in a building in Central that fell to progress in the nineties. They are the only noticeably Chinese feature of the room.

The dining table is solid and dark and very British. The lounge suite in the other half of the room is modern and from nowhere in particular, arranged around a coffee table and a large-screen TV set to CNN. Behind the furthest armchair, between it and an upright piano, is the glass case Simon announced when we arrived as his ‘cabinet of curiosities’. He took us through its contents then, our bags still at our feet, and put Lacy’s developing eye-glaze down to jetlag. If he quizzed us on it now, I would fare better than she would, but not much.

From the distance of the kitchen, I can still identify a postage-stamp-sized photo booklet of Hitler on tour in the early 1930s, a certified genuine piece of the Berlin Wall with pink paint on it, a troop of restored finger-sized Egyptian camel cavalry, a flat tin soldier from mid-nineteenth-century Germany and some coins. At least two of the coins are gold, one a guinea of one of the English King Georges, the other a Roman aureus bought by Simon on a layover in Rome that coincided with his birthday. Vespasian. He showed me the letters clearly on the coin: ‘Vespasianvs’. Struck in the last year of the emperor’s reign, AD 79. Simon was explaining how he could tell that when Faye stepped in to say he needed to release us so that we could freshen up.

‘But I haven’t even shown them the phrenology calipers yet,’ he said. ‘Knock-off ceramic phrenology heads are designer tat now, but these calipers are real.’

He lifted them out and click-clacked them, but Faye already had a weary Lacy by the elbow, guiding her to the stairs.

The moment she stepped out of the shower, her towel around her, Lacy took my face in her hands and said, with a mad intensity, ‘“But I haven’t even shown you the phrenology calipers yet!” Were you expecting that?’ She lifted her hands away and snapped her fingers and thumbs together frantically, like pincers. ‘You know you’ll be back at that cabinet. He’s not done yet.’