‘Again, I can think of no clear link,’ said the doctor. ‘Muscle weakness and inebriation, yes, but the symptoms that Mr Reddish is describing don’t fall into this category.’

‘She was a delicate little thing,’ said Mr Reddish, nostalgically. ‘When we arrived at the entrance to Goodge Street, she said, “Thank you, sir, you’re very kind,” and skipped away towards the escalators like a damsel-fly.’ He flicked his fingers in an impression of gauzy delicacy and Noel had to bite his cheeks and glance towards Mr Jepson, who’d always been a useful collaborator at these moments, able to balance a poker face against a gleam in the eye. But Mr Jepson was concentrating on his grapefruit. Since the evening of the Methodist Entertainment, he had moved around the house as if on a different track to Noel, smiling as he passed, still in the vicinity but no longer heading the same way. And during their Tuesday Latin lesson, Noel had turned the page on an unseen translation and had found himself picking his way through a Pliny passage extolling the fortitude of Vespasian’s forces: ‘When the men fought they were as brave as wild-cats and as unbending as the pines that grow upon the Palatine Hill. Though spears fell like snow they did not flinch.’ He had hurried on, but embarrassment had crackled in the air and Mr Jepson’s face had lost all its humour and alertness so that he’d resembled a ventriloquist’s dummy, cheeks painted red, the expression stiff and unnatural. All the ease of their usual conversation had disappeared, and for once, Noel had been glad when the lesson had ended and he’d been able to leave the room. Thinking about it afterwards, he’d found himself torn between sympathy and irritation; he’d seen it before, this tendency of adults to let a single flawed moment ruin everything, and he wished he could say something bald and straightforward: ‘Mr Jepson, despite my youth, I have been present at the worst minutes of several other people, by which measure the incident in the kitchen at the Drill Hall pales into insignificance, and I can assure you that I have no intention of ever referring to it again, nor do I think the less of you because of it, whatever its cause. Can we now carry on making puns about Suetonius?’

Without Mr Jepson to bounce off, the breakfast-table conversation seemed to Noel to have a dreadful flatness, emphatically lacking seasonal cheer. Mr Reddish had heard on the morning news that the Germans were continuing an extensive counterattack on the Western Front. He had also heard that the Tube strike had been extended over Boxing Day, that three rockets had fallen in South London on Christmas Eve, and that Ming the Panda had died at London Zoo. Mr Reddish and Dr Parry-Jones agreed that the Tube strikers were not only unpatriotic but almost certainly communist. Miss Appleby said that she’d once been to see Ming when accompanied by a sailor she’d been walking out with who was himself now dead. Mr Reddish remarked that many people who had been alive at the start of the war were now dead. Miss Appleby started to cry and said that the war had only taken the best, and Dr Parry-Jones said that, as a matter of fact, she’d known of several ne’er-do-wells who’d died as a result of enemy action, and that death was the great leveller, winnowing saints and sinners alike. Mr Reddish recited ‘Death Be Not Proud’, Vee cleared the dishes, and breakfast was over.