Inside this crate were science-lab essentials – microscopes and Petri dishes, three-way switches and soldering irons, boiling flasks and Bunsen burners. Ben said he’d got a sense from his telephone interviews with Mr Crane that there would be very little apparatus to play with at the school. He’d even made an advance order of chemicals to arrive with him on the August ship. Everything was stacked up in Esther Deezer’s front room and would need fetching across to the school soon, since Esther didn’t believe in using her front room for anything, not even for tea with Father Daniel when he did his rounds.

‘So, all I need now,’ said Ben, as he passed down the sodden tiles, ‘is for someone to help me steal a gas canister from the kitchen?’

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘To make fire!’ he pronounced in a conjuror’s voice.

He hauled himself up into the crawl space above the classroom to find the source of the leak. It took us about an hour to fix it, me making trips up and down the ladder, holding torches, passing pliers, finding cloths and nails. At one point, Ben requested a fifty-pence piece, as if I would have one on my person. I laughed, thinking it a joke, but he genuinely needed it.

‘You settle everything at the end of the month,’ I found myself explaining, ‘at the Anchor and at the Provisions Store. There’s little reason to carry cash.’ It was not the first everyday and obvious thing that he had needed spelling out to him. His delight at these details, his amazement even – it could make you feel weird and backward, but also exceptional, glamorous.

I went into the other classroom to retrieve some change from Ben’s jacket and, after returning and handing over the coin, I offered: ‘The black thing in your pocket with the money…’ I’d pulled out a smooth, almost-alien object to get to the coins below. ‘Sorry, that was rude,’ I countered swiftly, speaking only to the movement of him above me in the darkness. ‘You don’t have to say, it’s just that…’

‘The iPhone?’ he called down.

‘I thought so!’

‘It’s the SE. I left too early to get the Eight.’

I had seen them before, in pictures, online – Smartphones – seen older versions in the hands of tourists. I had never touched one.

‘I can’t get used to not carrying it with me,’ he yelled.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

I had read an unfathomable article about phone addiction in a mainland magazine. It was illustrated with an image of a couple sitting together but alone in bed, their faces illuminated by the blue light of their handsets. After holding the delicious weight of Ben’s phone in my palm, I thought I might begin to understand the attraction.