‘You see,’ she said, turning the wheel towards the crooked entry gates. The timber struts were desiccated, grey as chicken bones. ‘It isn’t such a cinch to find us, is it?’

‘Where’s the house?’ Joyce asked, scrunching up her eyes to get a view beyond the treeline.

‘We’ve a little bit to go yet. The track curves up to it. Would one of you mind jumping out and opening the gate?’

They’d thought of putting up a sign when they’d moved in. But as nice as it had looked when Arthur painted LEVENTREE on to the plaque and varnished it, they couldn’t find the right position for it at the entrance. In the end, they’d both decided it was best to fix it to the body of the house, above the transom window. But they’d always known, no matter how much ground they could prepare ahead of time, the spirit of the place would be established when their first apprentices arrived.

Looking at them now – ungainly Joyce with both knees kissing the glovebox, sombre Charlie opening the gate beyond the windscreen – she wondered if the right selection had been made. She could still recall that day in late October when a batch of drawings had come in from Redditch, Lowdham Grange and Huntercombe – a set of envelopes so thick and heavy that the postman had complained of a sore shoulder – and the sanguine exercise of laying each one out on Arthur’s trestle table to scrutinize their worth.

How many of those sheets of work were mediocre, showing no basic glimmer of potential (lazy marks impressed by too-blunt pencils, inconsistencies of scale, indifference to perspective). How many evinced a certain competence that they found spiriting yet somehow ordinary (nicely put-together sketches of exteriors that looked traced from an old print; faithful replications of original details by Wren or Lutyens without much nuance or precision, as though made at the behest of an over-eager tutor lacking knowledge of his own). And then one exceptional piece had surfaced in the pile, bearing the stamp of Huntercombe and the number 27: a line drawing of a bridge between two buildings that had clearly been imagined, one being Gothic, crumbling, the other being a futuristic block of intersecting oblong beams. They were as confused by it as they were exhilarated. Not only did it show technique – an early draughtsman’s accuracy – it displayed an eye for composition and peculiar inventiveness. They knew, right then, they’d found what they were looking for. When Arthur followed up with Huntercombe to ask the name of number 27, he was told about a boy called Charlie Savigear, generally well behaved, a bit intense, a decent athlete.

Then, a few weeks later, in a packet from the girls’ facility at Aylesbury, they’d discovered something almost as exceptional – a study of a church’s flying buttress with a wonderful exactness of detail; the mossy growth between the bricks appeared to stand up on the paper. It demonstrated talent that was perhaps more painterly than architectural, but it was striking and persuasive. Again, Arthur had phoned up the housemaster at Aylesbury who’d been in charge of organizing their submissions and at a certain point he’d covered the receiver to collect his thoughts. His brow had furrowed. ‘Spell that for me, please,’ he’d asked, scribbling it on to a notepad. ‘Do you know if this girl has a brother …? Well, do you think you could find out for me?’ Then he’d slumped into his chair and lobbed the notepad over his desk so she could read it. ‘Two needles in a haystack,’ he’d explained, ‘and they’re related.’