“No, she preferred it that way.” Lulu checked herself. “I would have, anyway,” she added quickly. “It’d be such a fuss to go through life as Jojo-Shusha-Feffa, I’m sure she’d have preferred plain old Jo.”

“I think Josephine’s a pretty name,” said Fee. “You were going to be the first to be called it in full, Emma, but poor old Lu here just couldn’t get her tongue around it, so it had to be Emma instead.”

“I don’t remember anybody consulting me about the change,” noted Emma. “Perhaps I’d have liked to carry on being called Josephine, but did anyone ask? Noooo.”

“Josephine wouldn’t have suited you,” said Lulu. “Emma’s such a bossy name, and you were born to boss.”

“No, I wasn’t. And wipe your face, it’s all dusty.”

“Oh, har-di-har, my sister’s so amusing.” But Lulu laughed anyway, and stuck out a cheerful tongue; finding Grandma Jo had clearly pleased her.

“We did feel bad taking your name away from you, Emma,” said Fee. “But Lulu just couldn’t do it. Remember how hard she tried, David? She’d sit there going ‘Joo-joo, Joo-joo,’ you used to say she sounded like a rare African primate calling across the jungle to its young.”

“Happy days,” noted David. “When I was allowed to get a word in edgewise. Long gone now, of course.”

“And then it turned into Choo-Choo, and oh, Emma honey, it was so sweet because she just loved her Choo-Choo to pieces, and I’d take her to pick you up from school and she’d just roar at the top of her lungs, ‘Where’s my Choo-Choo? Come to meet my Choo-Choo!’—it was the cutest little thing I’d ever heard in my life.”

“I called her Choo-Choo?” said Lulu. “That was clever of me.”

“And one day Emma turned to me—she was a very grown-up little five-year-old, wasn’t she, David?—and said, ‘Mom? Would you please explain to my sister that I’m a girl, not a train?’ So we had a conference, didn’t we, David, and decided to call you Emma instead.”

So even at five, thought Emma a little sadly, she had been perceived as too grown-up for her pretty, romantic name.

“You see?” said Lulu. “Born to boss. You were never going to be Josephine.”

“My mother has just told me what my sister Lulu used to call me when we were small,” Emma said the next day to Rosie, her workmate, in the small, sunny office they shared in a building just behind King’s Cross. “She couldn’t pronounce my name so called me Choo-Choo. Mom just told us yesterday. What a weird little girl.”

“Choo-Choo?” Rosie frowned at her, puzzled. She was a rather stern young woman with blond, bobbed hair and horn-rimmed glasses, who tended to look at the world from a literal point of view. “How did she get Choo-Choo from Emma?”

“Emma’s my middle name, actually. My first name is Josephine.” Emma snorted. “Or, according to my sister the train spotter, Choo-Choo.”

“Well, if she was small, that was probably the best she could do,” said Rosie. Rosie had a good heart, but did not always recognize the subtler shades of humor.