‘Have you got a spot coming?’ Vee had asked, startling him in the hall on the morning of Boxing Day. He’d been standing in front of the huge Georgian mirror, turning his head from side to side, studying his face from unfamiliar angles, hoping to surprise himself with a glimpse of paternal cheekbone or a fleeting expression that matched his father’s. ‘You’ve always had nice skin,’ she’d added, carrying on past with an armful of ironed sheets, noticing nothing.

Which was, of course, what Noel wanted. His meeting with Sim was a secret which he had no intention of sharing, and yet he also found himself unable to resist using the word ‘father’; it kept rolling out of his mouth and into his conversations.

‘What was yours like?’ he’d asked Mr Jepson. They had been studying Daniel Deronda, so it was not quite a non-sequitur.

‘My father?’ Jepson had smiled, lifting his gaze as if just spotting someone coming in through the door. ‘Well, he was a quiet man, but very kind – he was a cabinet-maker; when he came home from work he’d say, “Hold out your hand, son,” and he’d tap his fingers on my palm and I’d find a little toy there, something he’d whittled in his lunch-hour – a soldier, or a whistle. Or once a key fob, shaped like an acorn. I had it with me in the trenches …’

Noel had asked Miss Appleby as well (‘My dad? Oh, he’s a terrible old fuddy-duddy’), and Dr Parry-Jones (‘How is this relevant to our studies?’), but not Vee, since for all her obliviousness in front of the mirror, she was unlikely to miss a clue of that size. And it wasn’t as if Noel had any actual desire to know anything about Vee’s father; he just wanted the topic to be voiced, present, a guest at the dinner table …

Mr Reddish, unexpectedly, had been the only person to turn the subject back to the questioner. ‘I wonder if you can help,’ Noel had said, looking up from a sticky calculation involving double-boilers of varying sizes, in One Hundred Problems in Logic. ‘I’m currently reading a George Eliot novel about a young man who finds out that he’s adopted. I need to write an essay on’ – it took him a second or two to invent a title – ‘“Desirable Paternal Qualities”.’

Mr Reddish, lying on the bed, had removed his wireless ear-piece and placed it on the counterpane. Noel was perched at the foot-end, using the chest of drawers as a desk. ‘Paternal qualities,’ repeated Mr Reddish, resting his hands across his stomach, fingertips touching. A burst of static from the ear-piece resolved into the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, those four insistent beats that Morse code enthusiasts had declared were the dot, dot, dot, dash that spelled out ‘V for Victory’, so that now it was never off the airwaves. ‘“Desirable Paternal Qualities”,’ said Mr Reddish again. ‘As Theseus declares in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “To you your father should be as a god. One that composed your beauties, yea, and one to whom you are but as a form in wax by him imprinted.”’ He returned his voice to more normal levels. ‘Of course, as a bachelor without offspring, I can only offer thoughts based on the finer attributes of my own father.’