There is an interloper in the hall. This is high culture; an event consecrated and serious, a performance. Two of the thousand or so people here have brought with them their baby. It is 8 p.m. on a Tuesday evening sometime in the twentieth century, the baby less than six months old.

At some moment as we are moving in to our seats, greeting people we know—friends, acquaintances, others; that noisy affair so well rehearsed of shuffling past, excuse me and oh hello, dear, and how are you this evening?—there is a recognition of the alien in our midst. Prominent, because its parents have purchased seats in the choir stalls where it sits on their laps facing us, looking down. It isn’t until we are all seated and waiting for the start that it hits, at first a minor panic. Surely a joke. Without trying, I become part of this us, reluctant but fully implicated, nervous about whether the baby will know how to behave. The parents, smiling and playing with their baby, look as if they consider their attendance the most normal arrangement in the world.