‘Still here?’ asked his father, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief as he re-emerged. ‘Where shall we go now?’

‘Would you like to see the Cast Court?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘The armoury corridor? They have a display of Tudor sabatons – it’s extraordinary to see how small men’s feet were in the sixteenth century.’

‘Is it? Sorry, it’s just … when I was fifteen, you couldn’t have got me near a museum – I’d rather have done almost anything else. Still, we can’t all be the same, can we? Lead on, Macduff.’

The heartiness of the last two sentences was belied by a toneless delivery, as if they were being read by a bored actor, and the thought came to Noel (like an ice-cube dropped down the back of his neck), that perhaps his father had only come to the museum because he’d had nothing else to do that morning, rather than out of any desire to meet him again. Perhaps that first encounter on Christmas Day had been enough for him, a simple assuagement of curiosity; or perhaps he’d been disappointed – had been hoping for a different sort of boy: rowdy, vivid, sporting; maybe that’s what a father required: a replica.

‘What did you do, then?’ asked Noel. ‘At my age?’

‘I suppose, when I wasn’t at school, I rampaged around with pals. Or hung about near the girls’-school entrance.’

‘I have a girlfriend,’ said Noel, with attempted casualness.

‘Glad to hear it. Is she pretty?’

‘Do you know the da Vinci portrait of the The Lady with the Ermine?’

‘You mean she’s on the po-faced side? Like Mona?’

‘No. I mean …’ Noel weighed the public embarrassment of uttering the words ‘gamine yet possessed of soulful depths’ and then realized that Sim wasn’t listening anyway, or even looking towards him, and that his face in repose looked not only ill, but glumly exhausted, the expression of someone in a hopeless fix, a man trapped in a muddy hole.

‘We could do something else,’ said Noel. ‘We could go to …’ He groped for a destination that his father might find entertaining, but the night without sleep had sanded his thoughts down to nubbins and all he could think of was the seaside, Vee gallivanting along the prom while he sat in the dark, tearing at his fingernails. ‘The Serpentine,’ he said. ‘We could take a boat out, if it’s not still frozen.’

‘Somewhat of a busman’s holiday for me,’ said Simeon, rousing himself. ‘Besides, I’ll have to head off pretty soon, old chap.’

‘But you’ve only just arrived.’

‘Duty calls. In any case, shouldn’t you be in school?’

‘I’m playing truant.’

‘Wagging off, we used to call it. You’ll catch it from your aunt.’

‘No, I won’t.’ The morning’s fury rose again, gusting around his skull – as if Vee would have any right to lecture him about anything. ‘She’s not even my aunt, anyway,’ he muttered, and Sim, who had begun to move away towards the stairs, looked back at him, curiously.