Mr Lundy kept them in the pigeonhole outside the staffroom. Once a fortnight, he’d ascribe a building programme to the group and leave it for collection on a Thursday morning. They would have until that evening – a minute before nine p.m. – to submit a set of sketches in response to his conditions. If they were a second late, they couldn’t get their pages stamped and would incur a fail grade. So far, none of the assignments had ignited her imagination.

She’d planned to go back to her room to work on her designs. At Rankin Hall, she had a draughting board set up beside her window on the top floor, overlooking Sefton Park. The afternoons were always peaceful there and she could put the wireless on and listen to the violin recitals and the military bands while she was sketching. But that kind of solitude seemed less appealing to her now. Instead, she went with Arthur to collect his copy of the programme, then stood there watching him flick through it with his brow sloped downward in examination of the brief. And when he looked at her, in search of her opinion, she said, ‘Arts and Crafts – I’m happy. If I never have to shade another Doric column, it’ll be too soon. And I happen to like Webb and Voysey quite a bit. Would you rather it were something different?’

‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I’ve had to read so much these past few months to catch up with the others – I haven’t even started on the Ruskin yet. I don’t know Arts and Crafts at all.’

‘That’s what the library’s for,’ she said. ‘We’ll catch them before lunch hour.’

His face reanimated. ‘We?’

*

Every time they were alone, he noticed something new about her. In the library, she hushed her voice into a higher pitch. She fussed with the stray pin curls round her ears, patted at her breastbone in the throes of speaking, thumbed the fabric of her blouse above her clavicle. He hadn’t even thought that she would stay there with him, but she did. It seemed there wasn’t much she didn’t know about the Arts and Crafts movement. She put him at a desk with several books held open at the glossy centre pages, showing photographs of houses built by Philip Webb. The mannered, partly rendered details that he studied – timber rafters, cone-roofed wells – were elegant yet rustic, and he admired them a good deal. She kept returning from the shelves with other texts, on Voysey, Lethaby, Mackmurdo, William Morris, skimming through them, muttering her quick tutorials while he listened and appraised the drawings. Before the library shut, he went to borrow his allowance of the books, and Florence let him put the rest on her own card. ‘Don’t leave town,’ she said. He asked if she would join him in the park so they might keep on studying in the fresh air, but she had somewhere else to be. ‘I think a bit of rain is on the way,’ she said, examining the distance. ‘Besides, I’ve got a meeting at my residence. Someone on my floor keeps breaking curfew and the warden isn’t happy.’