‘Yes, from what I’ve read. You don’t agree?’

‘It seems all right. But I’m not sure if I could name another school. There must be plenty down in London, are there? Good ones, I suppose.’

Just when she believed that she was close to understanding him entirely, he’d surprise her with another layer he’d been withholding. ‘Didn’t you apply elsewhere?’

‘That’s what I was getting at before. I’ve never had a big desire to be an architect, but people think I’ve got a skill for it. Perhaps they’re wrong – and I suppose I’ll find that out. But the only way I’d want to be an architect is if it’s all about the work itself – to see if I can’t change something about the way things are, conditions people have to live in nowadays. It seems most fellas in our group are happy just to join the ranks, you know, and make a shilling. Fair enough, there’s nothing wrong with earning, but I couldn’t be content with just maintaining things as they are now. Don’t see much good in that, do you?’

‘Not really, no.’ She found it wasn’t difficult to stare at him when he was speaking. They were close enough that she could see a tiny trail of whiskers on his jaw, missed by the razor, and a splinter of char siu caught in his teeth. He was like those bricked-up windows on the side of the school building: attractively imperfect.

‘At any rate,’ he said, ‘I’m only here because somebody vouched for me. I can’t afford to let him down.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because. The likes of me don’t get too many second chances.’ He pinched the flesh around his nose. There was tiredness about his eyelids now. ‘I have a – well, it’s hard to say out loud. I have a record. Criminal, I mean. I’m none too proud of it. I’m not ashamed of it exactly neither. Just, you know – that’s how it is. I didn’t have things easy, growing up. Don’t really like to speak about it much. And, well, I meant to tell you all of this before. I’m sorry if it shocks you, but –’

She reached and took his hand. ‘I heard a rumour that you went to borstal. But I got that from Bill Embry and I’d rather hear the rest of it from you.’

‘Embry? Jesus. Who’d he get it from?’

‘He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.’ There was a kind of panic in his squinting eyes, a moist heat to his palm, but he allowed her to keep hold.

*

He’d never shared so much about himself without a spit and polish on the tale to make it more respectable. But he gave Florence the entire, unburnished truth. Because he’d never been in a position where, by talking of it, he could feel as though another person wanted to appreciate his past for what it was: the makings of the person he was trying to become.

There were things he told her that he’d never let escape his mouth before. Such as the scrap of information he’d picked up about his father – that he’d served aboard a merchant navy training ship berthed at the Sloyne. Not once had he cared to check if this was true or not – he wouldn’t give the coward the satisfaction of believing he existed – but he told Florence of it nonetheless. And he even spoke with honesty about his mother. Where usually he’d say to people that she’d had tuberculosis or pneumonia to avoid a raft of questions on the matter, he didn’t hide the facts this time: she’d died from losing too much blood in labour and had never even held him in her arms.