Noel aimed a hard stare at the back of the woman’s neck. The category of ‘father’ might be a blank to him, but he knew plenty about Desirable Maternal Qualities. In a similar situation, rather than chastising him, Mattie might well have used the multiple bosoms on the Moghul Gate as a chance to work on the higher reaches of the two-times table, while Vee wouldn’t have taken her eyes off him for a second, just in case something was accidentally knocked over or smashed, although if this had actually happened, she’d have scooped Noel under her arm and scarpered to the lower-ground exit, pursued by fist-shaking museum guards.

Of course, the child in the pink coat couldn’t be more than two or three years old, and Noel had already turned four by the time he’d met Mattie. Of his life before then, in a home for children with polio, he retained only a vague memory of a room full of high-sided cots and a sense of chafing compression, the latter explained by the fact that he’d arrived at Green Shutters wearing a stiff leather corset, prescribed in order to support his affected back muscles. Mattie had taken him to a masseuse, who had suggested long walks over uneven ground, and the corset had been ceremonially burned in a brazier in the back garden, leading to a smell so pungent as to be almost visible, and multiple complaints from the neighbours. Not that Mattie had cared; ‘Fearless Devotion’ might have been the label for her particular brand of parenting, just as ‘Fretting Fondness’ might be Vee’s; both styles, centred as they were on his own welfare, seemed to Noel superior to what Nigel was going to have to put up with.

The pink coat was dragged away; the court was momentarily empty and then his father walked in and, before he knew what he was doing, Noel had shouted ‘Hello!’, his voice cracking halfway through the word in that humiliating half-octave plummet that still happened when he was upset or excited.

The lieutenant tipped his head back – ‘Are you calling me?’ – and it wasn’t his father at all, but a man with a pale, lipless face, who took off his cap to reveal hair the colour of a pumpkin. The sight was dislocating; Noel felt as if he’d missed a step in the dark.

‘Sorry. I thought you were somebody else.’ He drew back against a table laden with plaster medallions and watched the lieutenant progress around the gallery, his hair startlingly bright against the marbles and clays. Ida Pearse, the woman who’d given birth to Noel, was also a redhead, of course – a redhead, a senior nurse and a fine girl; he had a mother who consisted of two concrete but generic facts and a nebulous summation. He wasn’t sure that he really believed in her; she was like the Princess-over-the-Water in fairy tales.

Disappointment had left him feeling hungry, and he ate one of his sandwiches: soy-bean paste with finely chopped gherkin, a surprisingly successful combination. It was, after all (he reminded himself), only Tuesday. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ his father had said, of their prospective meeting. There was plenty of time yet.