She decided it was best to take them straight upstairs and show them to their rooms. The parlour could be saved for later. It was the only space within the house that she and Arthur hadn’t finished to their satisfaction. All her parents’ furniture remained, in more or less the same arrangement it had been in since she was eight, playing by her father’s slippered feet as he read periodicals. They’d stripped the walls and painted them – a rich autumnal shade called Middle Buff that Arthur had got cheaply from a wholesaler in Peckham. She’d patched the ceiling cracks, torn out the phoney cornices, sanded down the beams to show the grain of all the oak and given them a shine of beeswax. But until they could afford to shift the furniture and make more of their own, the room was an embarrassment of styles: the lace and gilt-frame gaudiness of the Victorians (her mother’s taste) and the tweedy blandness of a country hotel lobby (her father’s). Arthur liked to keep the parlour door closed so their clients wouldn’t see it and preferred to rest beside the fire in the draughting room: his soundest sleeps, it seemed to her, were always in the armchair with his feet up on the coal bucket.

For now, the Savigears were boarding on the first floor, in the east wing of the house. She and Arthur had discussed the allocation of their rooms for weeks, trying to see the arguments from both sides, but now it all seemed moot: just like the Savigears, one space was much larger than the other. Still, as she escorted them up to the landing, she felt obliged to give the rationale. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, but your sister has the bigger room.’ She heard a crack of Joyce’s laughter from behind. ‘But if and when we take on more apprentices, she’ll have to share it and we’ll put up a partition wall or two. So things will even out eventually.’ At this, Charlie turned and gave his sister bug eyes; then he said, ‘I don’t mind, miss. It’s good enough for me. A comfy bed and a good reading lamp, that’s all I need.’

Florence almost wished that she could put her arm around him. ‘Those things we can promise you,’ she said. ‘And if you get a hankering for any other furniture, well, you let us know. Mr Mayhood thinks it would be nice if you’d consider how you want these rooms of yours to look – right down to the finest detail. They’re extremely bare, but you should see them as blank canvases.’

She showed Joyce to her bedroom first: a broad, white space with a bay window overlooking the north field. It had an iron bedstead, an ottoman, a desk, a wardrobe and a simple rag rug she had woven out of fabric scraps. What a thrill it was to watch Joyce sitting sidelong on the bed, giving out a short sigh as she bounced the mattress with her backside, taking in the softness of the counterpane and pillow with her palms. ‘Mr Mayhood wants you to submit designs for his approval,’ Florence went on. ‘We’ve a budget for materials, and we can help you with the carpentry, the decorating. But that’s all for later on.’