By the time they’d parked up on the mud, the sun had dipped behind the clouds. Mr Mayhood had called back at them from the front seat, ‘A lot of voices and opinions on a building site can get confusing, so resist the urge to chatter once we’re out there, please. If there are things you want to know, just write them down and ask me later. With a bit of luck, we shouldn’t be here longer than an hour.’

Together, they’d gone trudging over to the office of the clerk of works. It was only a small shed of corrugated iron with dirty windows and Charlie had the strangest sense that he was bunkering against the world again – its atmosphere was not much different from the Anderson in Aunty Helen’s garden, only with a lot more room to stand up straight and pace around.

The clerk of works, whose name was Vernon Quinn, had taken off his cap to greet them, holding it across his heart as though he was about to sing the national anthem. ‘Arthur, Flo, always a pleasure,’ he’d said. ‘Do you want to go and see about that steelwork right away? Or should I ease you in, one headache at a time?’

‘Nice to see you, Vern. It’s your decision. Take us where you need us most.’

‘All right, then. I’ll get my coat on.’

Mr Mayhood had stood back to let him through. ‘Any other variations?’

‘Not yet. But I reckon one’s enough, don’t you?’

‘Amen to that.’

‘How long can you stay today? ’Cause if I’m right about the steel, you’ll need to fix the drawings and sign off on the VO.’

‘We’d like to see the patient first, if you don’t mind, before we do the amputation.’

Quinn had laughed at at this, although a bit uneasily. Fetching his jacket from the hooks beside the door, his eyes had shifted towards Charlie and his sister. ‘Have a look at those fresh faces. They don’t know the life of aggravation that awaits ’em, do they?’

‘They’ll know it by the time we’re finished here.’

‘Where’s Tommy?’ Florence had put in. ‘I thought he’d have the kettle on for us already.’

‘No, he’s out there, doing what a foreman does. Standing round and pointing out the bleedin’ obvious.’ With a flourish, Quinn had straightened out the peak of his flat cap. ‘Right then, lads and lasses – shall we?’

The ground floor of the Proctor house was almost done, or at least the outer shell. But Charlie hadn’t got a proper measure of the builders’ progress, given that so much of it was screened behind a layer of scaffolding. He knew how it was meant to look when it was finished. The Mayhoods had designed a low, wide house, with one long fascia and a taller section to the south, so that the bedroom had a view towards the river. The windows were supposed to rest upon a course of brickwork on all sides. Walls that didn’t bear a load or brace the wind were going to be made of glass or board and batten. Mr Mayhood had explained the process, months ago, standing at the noticeboard with him and Joyce, examining the drawings as a means of teaching them approaches to construction. ‘It’s one of Wright’s old tricks – he got it from the Japanese, I think,’ he’d said. ‘It’s such a simple method really, everybody ought to do it, but you have to find the right contractor for the job. There’ll be insulation issues, if the work’s done badly …’ Even then, to Charlie’s untrained ears, it hadn’t seemed a difficult technique to master. First, the builders had to make an inner section of the wall from plywood, skin it with a membrane to protect from damp. Next, they’d screw in battens on both sides to support the narrow boards of pine, all sanded down and oiled to show their grain. It’d give the house a rustic feeling, soften its impression on the landscape; but anyone who saw it would be bound to say how fresh it was, how modern.