Zeno dipped the sponge, the size of a rugger ball, into the water, and sponged the conditioner from his hair. It fell smooth and straight almost to his shoulders.

“By ‘we’ I mean all the people who have taught me, whose combined knowledge I am the sum total of. You won’t have to attend any extra classes . . .”

“But I know how to breathe,” she repeated, realising the surprise was not going to be the roller-skating boots signed by Raquel Welch that she was convinced would fit her now, and which Zeno still cherished.

Her dad reached out for one of the selection of towels which hung on heated brass pipes that almost covered the wall behind him, and, lifting his hair, twisted the towel into a turban with a practised movement. It was a gesture Zen usually relished. She liked the look it gave her dad, and signified the water part of their evening was at an end. To be followed, if he was in the mood, by a massage of her feet—‘zoning’, he called it. Today she was impervious to the twisted towel, and made faces at her own reflection.

Zeno pressed on. “There is a mystery about breath which few are aware of. As a matter of fact, I’d say about . . .” he mentally counted, watching her face in the mirror to see if he had captured her attention, “ . . . one in eight million.” He had.

“Of course, I regard you as special: you have a proper diet like me. But if you don’t feel up to it . . . I mean, you are only nine, perhaps if we wait . . .”

“A mystery,” she said, watching from the corner of her eye as he climbed from the bath and wound himself into an outsized flat linen towel—towels purchased at auction from the hoard of a maharajah, bought from Harrods in the Thirties when chauffeurs were sent to fill their travelling trunks with them, and never used, was the tale he had told her.

“Have you ever wondered where breath comes from? Or where it goes to, for that matter?”

Zen had a foot out of the water. She was studying her toenails, one of which was varnished. “Well, it’s just there, isn’t it?” Zen was now staring intently at the painted toenail. “Do you think this is a good shade for me? It’s Chinese Red.”

“I suppose so, if you see yourself as a wanton dragon-lady type.”

“What does ‘wanton’ mean?”

“Oh, it means a girl who is unrestrained, who wants everything. There are girls like that—they go shopping all the time.

“How boring.”

“Exactly.”

Zen swivelled around to the end of the tub that Zeno had vacated, and pulled the plug. “So what’s the mystery then?”

“The secret of life is hidden in the breath, because when the breath leaves the body, the body, for all its marvellous ingenuity, goes back to being dust.”

“Eaten by worms.”