There was a long pause; Mr Reddish’s fingers drummed his knitted waistcoat. All Noel could see of his face was the spongy nose, the empty sag of the jowls.

‘He had none,’ said Mr Reddish, abruptly. ‘As a young lady once said to me – a young lady who was very special to me – “Your father is an extremely unpleasant man.” And he was unpleasant – and bitter, and jealous, and lazy. He knew of my theatrical ambitions and he laughed at them. He forbade me to join an amateur dramatic society as a youth, on the grounds that it would lead to effeminacy. He began to suffer from “glass back”. Have you ever heard the phrase?’

‘No.’

‘It signifies bone idleness in the guise of spurious infirmity. In other words, lying in bed while others work. I was the oldest in the family and had no choice but to leave school at the earliest possible opportunity. Having a moderate talent for mathematics, I became a clerk, perusing columns of figures while my youth fled. The war came and I was enrolled in the pay corps. The years passed. The velvet curtain closed for ever; the limelight gleamed, and was gone. Deadening, Noel. My soul turned to ash.’ The bed creaked as Mr Reddish pushed himself upright, taking two attempts to stand. He straightened his waistcoat. ‘I have no knowledge of your own paternal situation, Noel – it is none of my business – but I would say that the greatest gift my own father could have given me was his absence. And were I a parent myself, I would open the door of my house, and turn to my child and say’ – he extended an arm towards the imaginary horizon beyond the wardrobe – ‘“The World is Yours. I will help you if I can, but you must choose your own Way.”’

His arm had remained raised for several seconds, his expression poised somewhere between Wistful Melancholy and the Bright Dawn of a New Hope, and then, in lieu of an audience ovation, a V-2 had gone off somewhere – far enough away that they had felt no vibration, only caught the long, slow, dark rumble.

In the Cast Court, a woman was issuing orders. Noel looked down, and saw a very small child in a pink coat grasping the flexed leg of one of the dancing girls on the Moghul Gate as if it were a door handle. ‘No, you mustn’t touch,’ repeated the speaker. The child took its hand away, studied the writhing figures for a moment or two and then reached out and carefully patted one of the many, many globular breasts. ‘Nigel, what did Mummy say?’ asked the woman. She was sitting on the bench beside the plinth of the Trajan Column, reading a magazine. Nigel let go of the breast, leaned forward and licked another of the sculptures, and his mother rose with an exclamation, and swiftly crossed towards him, pulling him away from the Gate with such speed that he lost his footing and sat down heavily on the marble floor. The wail spiralled upward, like a siren.