You told him at the museum for about ten minutes.”

And he said, “Oh yeah,” and then he thought about it for a bit, and then he asked whether this meant he could go on the school trip, which it did not, and the conversation moved on, and about forty minutes later he came back into the kitchen and asked the second question.

“Did he not want me?”

Jessi has told me that she had rehearsed the answer to that one with Delia for two months, and that she still had to stop halfway through.

What she said was: “No.