‘Did you see they found a horse there a few months back?’ I saw the story on the Discovery Channel. ‘A racehorse. Or at least a racehorse-shaped defect in ash that they filled with plaster of Paris.’

‘I did.’ She turns away from the scene to look at me. ‘I did see that. It looked like a dusty white horse, lying there. So odd to think they’d just made it, filled a space that had been hidden there for years, like developing a photograph from an old negative.’ She glances back at the picture. It’s a gesture that suggests she’s drawing Walter into the conversation. ‘You have an interest in history.’ At first, I’m uncertain whether she’s talking to him or me, then she turns to face me again. ‘I have to explain Pompeii to most people.’

She sets the photo down, bumps the other large picture on the shelf and then straightens it again. It’s black and white, an image of two men in suits under an umbrella, one clearly Walter around thirty, his hair already in retreat, the other man a few years older, his thick hair turned back in a wave with a visible sheen to it, a grin that says he’s glad to be there, a white pocket square slipping lower than intended, only the point of it showing against the dark fabric of his jacket. The older man is holding the umbrella over the two of them. He is an actor. He is someone familiar, but out of context. At the edge of the shot a police officer faces away from them, water running from his cap.

‘Okay, I see Walter there, but the man with the umbrella . . .’

She nods. ‘Jack Kennedy. On the 1960 presidential campaign. Walter was helping out in Maine. His family had been senators there. His father, grandfather. The families had known each other for some time by then, the Bakers and the Kennedys, since at least World War One, when Walter’s grandfather, Talbot Baker, came out of retirement to take a role with the Department of the Navy and Joseph Kennedy Senior was a young man running a shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. An enormous shipbuilding program was underway. Talbot Baker acted in an oversight role in 1917. He also had an international posting, I believe, but it was that work with the destroyers and submarines that Walter recalled seeing photographs of. As most boys would.’

‘So, you knew Kennedy?’ I’ve been pinging my laser around the room and somehow not noticing the president, or candidate at least, grinning at me from under his umbrella.