‘You know we hate it when you’re unreliable, Emmy Lou and I wanted to be escorted by you.’

‘I am here after all to do that,’ he said reasonably, ‘even with a fierce and throbbing hangover of magisterial proportions,’ and Harry Donaldson gave both women such a woeful grimace that Frances and Emmy Lou both smiled at him and kissed him, Frances muttering unreliable old queen into his ear.

‘Oh what do we all look like after all these years!’ cried Harry melodramatically, ‘and in this heat.’ He put out both his arms, exaggerated, theatrical. ‘Come on my darlings, one arm each, The Three Stooges, let’s get it over with,’ and the three of them walked up the stone steps and into the building.

*

A short, rather overweight woman whose name was Izzy Fields arrived, perspiring slightly, on a bicycle. She locked it to the railings outside, ran up the steps taking off her safety helmet, thinking with pleasure of seeing everyone again. The helmet had pulled her short brown hair upwards and she looked like a middle-aged pixie.

Inside it was cooler and dark. Students passed, running up the stairs, calling, laughing, already perhaps sounding slightly exaggerated as out of the corner of their eyes they surveyed the old people coldly; their eyes lit up, however, as Terence Blue walked in the door.

‘It’s Terence Blue!’ they whispered to each other.

‘Up to the third floor, to the Music Room,’ somebody said and the visitors, who had once owned these corridors, stepped meekly into the lift or began walking up the old winding staircase. They passed young people: with trainers or tapshoes slung round their necks, with books in their hands, wearing crinolines, wearing tights, wearing corsets – for nothing looked out of the ordinary here; young people, young people. Just beginning.

Emmy Lou Brown stared at two pretty, laughing girls on the second staircase who almost danced by, oblivious, trailing rather grubby Victorian petticoats.

‘I could tell them a thing or two,’ Emmy Lou said as she stared, turning, watching them running down the stairs. Harry, who knew her so well, nudged her in exasperation. But when he saw the odd expression on her face, a kind of envy, a kind of pity, he only said gently, ‘They have to learn it themselves Em.’

‘Emmy, Emmy!’ a voice called. They looked over the bannisters and saw Izzy Fields running up the stairs carrying her yellow helmet, smiling at them all.

‘Oh look it’s dear old Izzy, she must’ve come on her bike,’ they all said, and smiled too.

*