Noel amused himself during the entertainment by composing caustic imaginary reviews. Mr Harry Wallford, of Wallford’s Plumbing Supplies, performing under the stage name ‘Happy Hal’, made a number of jokes that would have been commendably topical were it still 1939. The exception was one about the recent bomb plot to kill Hitler, the final line of which – ‘It blew his trousers off!’ – resulted in audience consternation and the hurried removal of a small child from the hall. Happy Hal had been preceded on stage by a trio of singers, The Treble Clef (… they’re all tone deaf) and followed by the Dorita Juveniles, the protégées of Mrs Claxton’s daughter, Dorita, who ran a Saturday ballet school (… I think we can safely say that the dying swan has never before felt quite as definitively dead). After that came Junior Master of Dexterity, Nigel Dunville, whose card tricks were performed with a minuscule pack that had clearly come from a pre-war cracker (… is it the Jack of diamonds, the ace of spades or an indecent photograph of Mata Hari? No one beyond the front row could possibly know …), and then Mr Reddish came on stage, cloaked in a maroon rug that Noel had last seen in the lumber room at home, and wearing a tie knotted round his head into which he’d stuck a couple of feathers. From the wings came a dull, repeated thud which was either Redskin war drums or Nigel Dunville hitting an upturned bucket with a sink mop.

Mr Reddish lifted his eyes towards an imaginary horizon, and matched his delivery to the low, steady rhythm.

‘By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

At the doorway of his wigwam,

In the pleasant Summer morning,

Hiawatha stood and—’

The floor shuddered and there was a noise like a quarry blast: a cracker-snap of explosive preceding the long, distant roar of falling rock. A woman yelped. Chairs toppled as people rose. ‘East, that was,’ said the man in front of Noel. Someone opened a door and the rumble rose briefly in volume and then slid gradually away, to be replaced by the noise of a bus changing gear as it tackled the long rise of Pond Street. People began to sit down again. ‘Miles away,’ muttered a man, dismissively. ‘I’d say that was Islington.’ Attention shifted back towards the stage, where Mr Reddish was still reciting, one hand cupped to an ear, his features bunched in an attempt to convey delicate wonderment:

‘Something in the hazy distance,

Coming nearer, nearer, nearer,

Was it Shingebis the diver?

Or the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah?

Or the white goose, Waw-be-wawa …?’

‘Excuse me,’ whispered Noel, exiting the row and walking rather hurriedly towards the door that led to the cloakrooms. In the corridor beyond, he found a coat cupboard, and he stuck his head inside and pressed his face to the heavy folds of a duffel coat until he’d stopped laughing. He could hear applause from the hall, and a piano playing the opening bars of ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, and he turned the other way and opened the kitchen door to find Mr Jepson sitting alone with a book and a cigarette.