Laure ushered May into the next room. ‘Interesting how a small boy found a way of dealing with it.’

‘Or the mother.’

Alerted by the acid inflection of ‘mother’, she asked, ‘Do your parents approve of what you do?’

‘What my father likes is bourbon. Lashings of it. Ask my dinosaur mother, who’s a good woman, by the way, but she just doesn’t happen to like her daughter… ask her what she hates most in the world she would treat you to the spiel about unmarried women paying astronomical rent to live in a box with cooking and plumbing smells in the Sodom of New York while waiting for the big break.’ May stared past Laure to a cabinet with a look that suggested difficult and complicated emotions. ‘She said it would be a hiding to nothing. It would be hard. And it was.’

‘I’m sure it was hard. But you made contacts. Obviously. Good contacts.’

May’s face cleared. ‘I did. It was one way of getting back at a mother born a hundred and fifty years ago but who happens to live now and whose pet hates are crazy liberals and feminists.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘That’s a long ways around of saying, she’s not like you.’

Laure had a startled micro-second to absorb that she was bracketed with May’s mother. Laugh or cry? ‘Right.’

‘Oh, Lord…’ Realizing she may have blundered, May Williams rattled around her journalistic armoury and produced a compliment. ‘I know you’re the sort of woman who’ll wear tight jumpers and eye shadow when you’re ninety.’

Laure found herself smiling. ‘Good.’

‘No children of your own?’

‘No.’

The unspoken question hovered. The unspoken answer sat on Laure’s tongue: I denied myself children. Not consciously, perhaps, but somehow it was never the right person, the right time, the right state of mind.

The two women continued onwards.

A few minutes later, May asked, ‘So why Czech?’

‘I lived there for a long summer.’

‘And that’s a broken promise?’

‘Actually, yes, as it turned out. It was.’

In the smaller room, the tall, lanky May resembled a confined animal. ‘How do you theme the display?’

‘Big question and it took us a lot of time to work out what was the most effective. In the end, we stuck to the relationship of the objects. Household stuff, say. Clothing. It doesn’t always work. But displaying the objects chronologically proved too difficult to control as we had to keep changing the rooms around.’

May snapped shut her notebook. ‘Sure.’

‘We’ve got a new patron and we’re discussing refurbishment.’ She led May towards the staircase, keeping the subject of conversation in her court. ‘Museum display is changing. Revolutionized, actually. Museums are becoming tactile places. Fun places. Unpredictable places. We have to keep up with the big guys.’