Sunday evening, nine o’clock. Theo stands bent over his drawing board set up on the dining room table, the table glass-topped, an embroidered doily beneath, the board on a sloping stack of old Esquire magazines, a far from perfect arrangement — the magazines slither, the board drifts and tilts — the work before him a hotel in the mountains, golf and tennis, horseriding and restaurants, pools, spas, luxury suites, eighty miles from the city, a steep site overlooking a lake. For ten o’clock Monday morning, a scant and rapidly slipping thirteen hours from now, Theo has to provide plans, elevations, parking facilities, diagrammatic traffic flow, other details, a full-colour rendering of the whole scheme too, five sheets of work at least, an impossible amount, if he works right through the night it probably still won’t all get done, the project set two weeks ago but Theo only just started, Theo’s mother in hospital this minute being operated on for cancer, Theo labouring now on the basic floor plan, the very first sheet.

‘What’s the time?’ his father says.