‘I stands afore you,’ said Winnie.

‘I catches your eye.’

‘I bows according.’

‘Down the hatch!’

There was a pause, and some coughing.

‘Bloody HELL,’ said Elsie, tears in her eyes. ‘I’ll have another of those.’

‘Are you looking for the RAF canteen?’ called Noel, as the third grey uniform in an hour wandered into view.

The figure looked up, startled, craning his head back to see the walkway on which Noel was standing.

‘Yes, actually, I am.’

‘Turn left at the bottom half of Trajan’s column, go out of the door, straight through the metalwork gallery and down the stairs by the cabinet of early-nineteenth-century milkmaids’ bonnets.’

‘Thanks awfully.’

Noel watched the small figure pass through the narrow gap between a Celtic cross and the Boy David, and then disappear from view behind a tank-sized Veronese pulpit, his footsteps audible for a few seconds longer. And then, once again, Noel was the only person in the entire, vast space. He resumed his slow circumnavigation. The walkway was more than thirty feet above ground, just below the boarded-up glass roof, and it ran all the way round both Cast Courts, affording a vertiginous view of the contents. Its balustrade was slightly lower than Noel found comfortable, and he kept his weight towards the wall, where smaller, less interesting casts were accumulating dust on a series of narrow tables: Greek porticos, Venetian well-covers, Roman inscriptions, all rendered in plaster, and cast from moulds, enabling all the culture of the Grand Tour to be delivered to those Victorians too poor, too frail or too female to make the journey to see them.

And now, of course, it was the casts themselves that were deemed too fragile to be moved, so that despite the fact that the museum façade was savagely pocked from blast damage, and that earlier in the war, a bomb had actually dropped straight through the roof and destroyed a pair of mediaeval German effigies, the two huge halls of the Cast Court looked just as they had throughout Noel’s childhood, when he had played Hide and Seek with Mattie among the colossal souvenirs: ‘Is that a stray cherub I spy behind the Portico of the Gloria, or have I found my godson?’ The rest of the museum was half empty, with only the most resilient or least valuable exhibits left on display. The majority of visitors seemed to be airmen, and most of those appeared to be looking for the temporary canteen. Noel had so far seen no one from the navy.

‘You back again?’ the doorman had said to him this morning. ‘You was here all day yesterday.’

‘I’m interpreting the frieze on Trajan’s column,’ he’d replied; he’d brought his binoculars and a notepad, for authenticity, as well as a packet of sandwiches and an apple.

He ate the apple and took another turn around the room, resisting the temptation to drop the core into the open goal of the Veronese pulpit, thirty feet below; such an impulse was possibly one of the reasons why the walkway was not actually open to the public, but there were so few staff currently at the museum that he had found his way up there unchallenged, walking through empty galleries and along passageways with cryptically labelled doors. It was the sort of mild rule-breaking that came to him automatically; a combination of Mattie’s lofty dismissal of the law, and Vee’s attempt to glide unnoticed just beneath it. Tomorrow – if he needed to come back again tomorrow – he might bring a camping-stool with him, and wait in comfort. Though ‘comfort’ was the wrong term: ever since Christmas Day he had felt like the rhinoceros in the Just So Stories, a pinch of grit permanently sifting beneath his skin. He felt so utterly different that he couldn’t believe that he still looked the same.