George crouched down to line up the needle with the track he wanted to play first. His robe bunched around his legs. I swivelled around to look at the paintings. The subject’s breast was still perfect and she still had the same expression on her face, as if she knew I was staring and daring me to keep doing it.

‘Quite nice, aren’t they?’ George said. All of a sudden he was standing beside me. ‘Romney doesn’t always get his due.’

I went red. I could feel it, the heat of it in my cheeks.

‘We’ve got nothing on our walls next door,’ I told him. I unzipped my tracksuit top, pretending I was hot. ‘All our stuff’s in storage in Brisbane. All our paintings and my father’s Olympic things, mounted models of half-yachts and photos of him competing. He was in the Olympic sailing team in 1964 and ’68.’

George had been in the war and owned theatres and art. My father had gone to kindy in the war and worked for Murdoch. But he didn’t invent tits on page three. The Olympics – that took something.

‘Oh, jolly well done,’ George said.

He was about to say more when I recognised the song that had started playing.

‘That’s our school hymn. One of our school hymns. In Brisbane.’ I reached over to the shelf and picked up the record sleeve, putting the Romneys behind me again. ‘But with different words. It was that tune, but different words.’

George pointed to the name of the hymn on the sleeve – ‘Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken’. I didn’t know it.

‘Interesting you should say that. We had a spot of bother with that tune during the war. It became the Jerry national anthem, so all of a sudden it was terribly wrong to play it. But the words . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Those noble English words. We were desperate to keep singing them. So a chap named Cyril Taylor wrote a new melody for them, for the BBC. It was instantly patriotic to prefer Taylor’s but, honestly, a stirring piece of music cannot be denied. But you had different words.’

‘“Praise the Lord Ye Heavens Adore Him” – that’s the name of the hymn we sing.’

He paused and thought about it, measuring it out in the air with his finger. ‘Oh, yes, I can see that. I can see that it scans. Sing me a little. I’d love to hear it. I didn’t say you’d be singing for your supper, did I? Or for your swim and cake, at least. I can play the piece from memory, you know and, look, I have the perfect instrument to play it on.’

He indicated the piano, as if it had just appeared. He started to move towards it, as though it was inevitable that I was going to sing, the next step in the sequence of events.