She jumped again, as Noel knocked on the window. ‘Eight,’ he mouthed, holding up the egg basket.

‘Good. Bring in a bucket of coke as well, will you?’

He nodded. The Lumb girl was lingering near the window, and before she could turn away, Vee hooked her eye and gave her a hard stare. She hadn’t been mothering Noel for four years just so that some pert blonde piece could break his heart like a stick of charcoal. Genevieve Lumb stared back, faintly puzzled.

‘I don’t think your aunt likes me very much,’ she said, joining Noel as he scattered fish-meal for the hens, ‘though I’m not aware I’ve done anything to offend her.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to offend my aunt for her not to like you,’ said Noel. ‘There may be other reasons.’

‘Such as what?’

He shook his head. Impossible to explain Vee’s myriad antipathies, her constantly updated list of prejudices and judgements. ‘Their name is legion,’ he said. ‘Though there are some we can discount – you’re not a man with a yellow tie, and you don’t have sideburns.’

Genevieve smiled, and Noel felt as if his heart were being slowly squeezed by one of her long-fingered hands. ‘And you’re not Welsh,’ he added.

Dr Parry-Jones always gripped her cutlery very near the ends, manipulating the knife and fork with delicate precision. She had a similar approach to conversation, impassively pinning down and dissecting casual remarks, so that a phrase such as ‘they say it’s going to be foggy tomorrow’ was left writhing under the scalpel. Vee had, in any case, only said it as a way of distracting the lodgers from the passage of the potato dish around the table – specifically from the sad, repeated clink clink of the spoon which indicated that there were only two each.

‘It was someone in the haberdasher’s that told me,’ she said. ‘I think they only said it “might be” foggy.’

‘They said it “might be”?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

Dr Parry-Jones continued to look at Vee enquiringly, as if awaiting more stringent clarification; she was a general practitioner, bombed out of her house but still cycling daily to her practice in Finchley, her age a mystery, her white hair strained into a French pleat, her crisply neat appearance a near-miracle in frayed, darned, second-hand London. She taught Noel Biology, Chemistry and accuracy; her steady gaze seemed to see and expect only the truth.

‘Maybe I heard it wrong,’ said Vee; the bowl of potatoes had reached her and there was only one left, which meant that someone (Mr Reddish) had taken three.

‘There was definitely no mention of fog in the Daily Telegraph weather notes,’ said Dr Parry-Jones, giving the conversational corpse a final prod.

Mr Reddish made the preliminary throat-clear that indicated that poetry was on the way.

‘Do you need some salt, Mr Reddish?’ suggested Vee, quickly, hoping to forestall him, but he was already in recital posture, chins lifted, one hand raised as if to ward off an attack. He worked in the accounts department of St Pancras Borough Council but spent his evenings performing in amateur entertainments. He had a very large head and had once, he claimed, been mistaken for President Roosevelt.