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“I suppose at least it was cooler at the lake. You’re looking very fit, anyway, Willard.”

He preens with a gratitude so visible that I’m ashamed – ashamed of the trick’s ease, but also that I never did it sooner, if it could ease him.

I suspect myself, though. I could be seeing the situation all askew. I so often have. And now I can think only of matronly maidens I’ve known, in whom solitude festered until it grew a mould as gay as a green leaf over their vision, and they would lightfoot around with a mad flittering of eyelashes, seemingly believing themselves irresistible to every male this side of the grave, and hankering after heaven so they might evolve into flirtatious angels and lure all those on the other side as well. Why did I speak? Why did I open my mouth? That’s what he’ll think – Rachel’s going the way they sometimes go – fancies herself as a –

I must not think this way. I mustn’t. I thought I might have shed that tic. But here it is.

“I was quite glad to get back,” Willard is saying. “To tell you the honest-to-goodness truth, I’m happiest when I’m here in school. One has a certain sense of – well, I suppose you could call it a sense of accomplishment.”

“Yes.”

“I think we’re going to have a good year. A rewarding year. We haven’t had to change any members of the staff, and I always think that’s a great asset, if one can carry on with the same team. Provided, of course, that the team is harmonious, which I think I can safely say ours here is. Oh, by the way, Rachel, you remember our little disciplinary problem just before the summer holidays?”

“Yes.” I press my palms together and find they slither with a cold wetness.

“I just want you to bear it in mind this year – if you have the slightest trouble with any of them, send them straight to me.”

“I – I’ll remember.”

“Positively no need for you to worry,” he says. “I’ll deal with them.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all,” he says courteously. “It’s a – it’s no bother. That’s what I’m here for. To sort out these little day-to-day problems.”

When he’s gone, I walk to the window and look out at the playground, the gravel, the swings, everything the same as last year. Nothing has changed. Not anything or anyone.

Willard will never know he yearns to punish. And I will hardly ever be certain whether I am imagining it or not. Only sometimes, when I’ve betrayed one of them.

Then I will be afraid. As I am now.

Eleven days. Eleven – really that many? Maybe I’ve miscounted. No, I haven’t. Eleven days. Never before. Two or three, sometimes, when I’ve had a cold or ’flu, or when I’ve been upset. But never this long overdue. Every day I’ve thought – today – and kept looking. How strange to have to keep on retreating to the only existing privacy, the only place one is permitted to be unquestionably alone, the lavatory. On a bedroom door other people can knock and force a reply, or even walk in as she sometimes does.

For the first few days, then a week, I couldn’t believe it at all, couldn’t take it seriously because I was so certain nothing like this could happen. God knows why I thought that. Not to me – always to someone else, as one naturally thinks of disaster. Not to me – always to someone else – as one thinks also of the most wanted.

I would like only one thing – not to have to consider anything except from this, itself, by itself. When I think of it like that, away from voices and eyes, it seems more than I could ever have hoped for in my life. How I feel about it does not depend on how he might feel or might not feel. Whatever he felt, or anyone, it would be mine and I would want it to be. How could I do anything against it that would not kill me as well? Would I have felt the same if I had detested him, if he’d been anyone and no one? No. That I couldn’t have borne. I’m certain of nothing and yet I’m certain of that. I never knew before. That would be more bitter than death, to grow an alien. I never knew before how terrible that would be. If it were Willard’s, say – then everything about me, my deepest