‘Perhaps just a relay spot then,’ Mrs Keene suggested, and George made a whooping noise and retreated from the doorway. ‘Smelling salts for Mr Lascelles!’ she called out, to nobody in particular.

‘Music,’ he said, fully recovered, next idea already there. ‘Music to swim by.’

On top of the long shelves of records in the sitting room, he had a turntable in a walnut case with a smoky glass or perspex lid. The instrument panel was brushed steel. My record player was about ninety-eight per cent red-and-white plastic. He pulled records out and pushed them back, working his way along the shelves, searching for something unspecified. He settled on one and showed me the sleeve, a wigged composer posed with his hand in his coat and the words ‘Georg Friedrich Händel Wassermusik – Water Music (Complete)’ in the yellow box above him.

‘If it’s good enough for a king to enjoy on the Thames, it’s good enough for us,’ George said, setting the record carefully on the turntable and lifting the lever that allowed the needle arm to swing across and drop into position.

String music burst from the speakers mounted on the walls, and he tweaked a knob and dropped the volume. He scanned the notes on the back of the sleeve, his free hand doing some conducting.

We were in the room I could see into from our kitchen. It had a fireplace with a fire set but not yet lit, twisted-newspaper fire starters under kindling and a larger piece of wood on top. Between the two windows, as if hiding from view, stood an old-fashioned grand piano made of a dark timber. It had its lid shut. The ornamental object I’d noticed hanging from the ceiling was, as I had thought, a chandelier. It was a bunch of upturned flowers and leaves on long stems, gathered together at their bases. The leaves were broad, and dark with oxidation, with deep veins. The flowers ranged from some that were daisy-size up to several made of red and colourless glass that opened up like trumpets and had light bulbs in them.

‘It’s Russian,’ George said. ‘Might even be the same age as the house, though I admit it would have been highly unusual to see one of these in a London house at the time. Lovely piece, though. Couldn’t resist it.’

‘We can see it from our kitchen,’ I told him. ‘I had wondered what it was.’

‘I bought it in Oxford, at an antique shop, ten years ago.’ He took a step to the left, to view it from a different angle. ‘The house it was in was being converted into flats, and it didn’t fit. A question of scale. The place had been owned by an Englishman who became a Russian Orthodox abbot – can’t be many of those around. He’d died and the building had been sold. Abbot Nicholas Alexei, apparently, though the person in the shop told me he’d seen the chap’s English name on some paperwork and that it was actually Sydney. You can’t have an Abbot Syd in the Russian Orthodox Church, I suppose. I’d moved in here shortly before, and the room was crying out for a chandelier. Look at the plasterwork up there, how it draws the eye to that spot. I’m sure there had been a chandelier there originally, but it had gone in a beastly modernisation before I arrived, replaced by a single bulb with a white glass bowl over it. Dreadful.’