Her assertion is contradicted by the boy’s complexion, which is pasty and pimpled, betraying poor diet and emotional imbalance. Peter is tall for his age, nearly six foot, and has nowhere to put his gangly extremities. He fidgets, picks his scabby chin and kicks me arhythmically under the table as lunch wears on. Service at the Royal, always tardy, has slowed to the point where I summon the sommelier and ask him if the rest of the Mediterranean staff have migrated for the winter. A typical Tuesday in recessional England.

Mrs Stemp – ‘Eleanor, please,’ – is thirty-five and fading. The veins are visible on both sides of her brow, where the mousy hair has begun to recede. In a couple of years, she will look middle-aged. I wonder if she was ever young. Eleanor Stemp works for an estate agent and lives vicariously through her wonderchild. All her hopes for happiness and security have been invested in his fragile gift for playing the fiddle, a talent he discovered at the age of four, ‘just after his father left us’. She wipes her mouth clean of avocado wisp, as if to erase her ex-husband’s genetic contribution.

The Simmonds Award is a vindication of all her privations, a first instalment on her earthly reward. She glows with a satisfaction verging on smugness, but the fruits of success are new to her lips and my gentle questioning is greeted with prickly suspicion. Mrs Stemp admits to playing the piano a little, ‘but only to help Peter with his practising, and sometimes to accompany him in a recital’. She is not a real musician, not even an amateur. Peter is the only artist in the family, deserving of all our attention.

Does she ever go to concerts? Eleanor shakes her head. ‘I have to be home at night to hear Peter practise and put him to bed,’ she says, a flake of cod-flesh falling from her fork. Peter, stabbing an overdone rump steak, keeps interrupting to finish her replies. They are more like a pair of spinster sisters than parent and son, having lived together too long for either of them to own an independent existence. Peter is a dull-witted boy and Mrs Stemp has ‘Victim’ written in emanescent fret-lines along her ferrety brow.

Over puddings of profiteroles with crème anglaise, I raise the subject of Peter’s education, gently explaining my views on the need to broaden it. I confide that Peter, remarkable as he is, had not impressed the other judges. Only my intimation of latent talent had qualified him for the Simmonds Award. That gift now needed to be brought out by intensive exposure to art and ideas. I propose that Peter should spend a year at my expense at a music-orientated boarding school – Chetham’s near Manchester, for example, or the Purcell in London. It is an offer most musicians would leap at but, from this Siamese pair, it elicits a positively Gilbertian patter-song of protest and refusal.