I breeze through how our friendship began, with her walking her little dog, and how my daughter and I started meeting her regularly. And then how we heard all about Girl Friday; and before I know it I’m launching into a spiel about how I’ve known Isla since we were in primary school, and how the idea came about, and how brilliant it would be for the museum, and our city: ‘Because Penny is just a normal woman,’ I explain. ‘She didn’t come from a privileged background. She wasn’t trained in fashion, she never even went to college – she just did a bit of modelling and worked as a typist, yet she went on to become huge, in that world, for those few years. Not in a Studio 54 kind of way, not like a Christian Dior or a Coco Chanel, but a real, normal woman who was entirely self-taught, and got off her arse and made it happen—’

I stop abruptly. I am sitting here with Hannah, a top person at this venerable institution, and I have just said ‘arse’.

She looks me right in the eye and smiles. ‘And that’s exactly what I love about this idea.’

I frown, confused.

‘I mean your absolute passion for it,’ she adds. ‘It shines out of your proposal – your enthusiasm and absolute belief in the project.’

‘Oh.’ I smile. ‘Well, thank you. I just feel—’

‘But when it dropped on my desk I was up to my eyes,’ she cuts in, ‘trying to convince the people who decide these things that the attack in the natural history department doesn’t mean we have to close permanently.’ Incredibly, her eyes well up. ‘I was up all night figuring out plans, doing budgets, trying to work out how we might recover from this, and it occurred to me …’ She looks down and flicks, seemingly randomly, through the pages of my proposal. ‘It occurred to me that, okay, we can repair the exhibits, we can sort that out. It’s not the end of the world really.’

‘I’m sure it can all be fixed,’ I say, as if I know anything about antique taxidermy displays.

‘Yes,’ Hannah says, ‘but then, when the dust had settled, so to speak, I started to think, the reason it happened – that crazy man barging in with the hammer – is because we are traditional, and that has its place, of course. But maybe an incident like that might be, well, not exactly good for the museum, it’s a colossal expense – but it might make us think about our future in a different way.’

‘In what way?’ I ask, not sure what she’s getting at here.

‘In a way that might make us more … broad-thinking,’ Hannah says, ‘and more appealing to a wider audience than we’ve ever attracted before.’