He started to play another tune from memory. It didn’t even look like a conscious choice. He couldn’t sit there without his hands moving back to the keys and playing something. I wanted to be as musical as that. I had for a long time. I wanted to have those instincts.

‘It’s a wonderful feeling, putting on a show, you know,’ he said. ‘The roar of the greasepaint. Nothing like it. I miss that, now that I’m running the bloody things instead of being in them.’

‘We had that in Brisbane.’ I recognised the name. ‘The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd.’

‘Oh, really?’ He seemed surprised. ‘Well done, Brisbane. It didn’t even make it to London when they put it on here. Not yet, anyway. Some good songs, but not much of a story. Did you see it?’ He played a four-note melody, singing his question along to it. I wondered if it was from the show and I was supposed to recognise it.

‘No, but I drove past it quite a bit.’ It was the Christmas holidays three years before, a dense, hot summer, two years after the cyclone summer that had flooded the city. The name had stuck in my head, all the actors with their greasepaint sliding off in the heat. ‘It’s on Turbot Street, the SGIO Theatre. They had a big sign out the front with the show’s name on it, sticking over the road.’

‘Turbot Street?’ He tried to place it. ‘Is that Brisbane’s theatre district?’

‘No. But it’s where the SGIO Theatre is.’ There was no theatre district, not that I knew of. ‘It and Her Majesty’s would be our two big theatres.’

‘Really? Her Majesty’s? Might be room for an Empire.’ He put on a hopeful look. ‘We can but dream. I’m embarrassed to say I know very little about Brisbane, other than that Bony from Arthur Upfield’s novels lived there, and he’s not even real. As far as I’m aware.’

He turned his attention to the keyboard again, and set his fingers on the keys. Just as I was sure I was getting away without singing, he played the opening line of the hymn.

‘That’s the key, I think,’ he said without turning around. ‘Ready?’

I cleared my throat again. Everything in my mouth dried up. He played through the verse one time, then nodded, his fingers poised to play more. My face was burning, but I was behind him, so he couldn’t see.

He started again and I hummed the final few notes of the intro and the words came out of me when they were supposed to, ‘heavens’ in the first line shortening to ‘heav’ns’, the way it appeared in my school hymnbook.

I made it through a whole verse, though it was half verse one and half verse two or three. ‘That’s all I know,’ I said, just as he was about to play on.

From behind me, someone applauded. It was Mrs Keene.