Milly and Tilly came up to me as I took my coat off and said, “What do you think, Lullah? Why did Cain do it?”

And Milly said, “Why did Cain do that weird thing to you? You know, the licking thing? The village girls were all hufty with us after you’d gone. Ecclesiastica gave us a message for you. She said, ‘Tell your gangly posh mate I know where she lives.’”

Oh goodie, what was going to come first: being chucked off the ladder of showbiz or having the golden slippers of applause stuffed up my nose by Eccles?

Then Lav and Dav came sauntering along.

Lavinia smiled her superior smile and said, “Helllllooo, Oirish, did you have a naaaice weekend, to be sure, to be sure. We all went down to London town to see a show, didn’t we, Dav, it was railly something. Kevin Spacey was in it as Richard the Second and he was, like, simply amazing. Railly, you know, lived the character. Amazing. His hump was, like … so alive.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say about a live hump, so I nodded and made for the loos.

But she kept on walking alongside me.

“What did you do, Oirish, did you do some of your special dahnsing to the village boys’ band??”

And she and Dav laughed. She put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulder and said, “Just joshing, Oirish, what did you do?”

I said, “We danced and, you know, chatted and …”

She said, “Ooohhh, have you been talking to boys, have you now? Any fella you’ve got your eye on? One of those naughty The Jones boys, is it? Or—no, I bet it’s one of those lads from Woolfe.”

What did she know? Had someone told her something? Had one of the boys from Woolfe said, “Charlie snogged Tallulah, and she was useless at it”? Maybe Charlie had told Jack and he’d told bat Ben and all of Woolfe Academy knew.

But Lav just said, “Was, er, Alex around at the dance at all? I’ve got a great idea for A Midsummer Night’s Dream—it’s a sound poem with gongs.”

I said, “What do the gongs do?”

And she laughed.

“Oooh, Tallulah, begorrah, begorrah.” And pinched my cheeks and said, “Keep smiling.”

I wish she would take her imaginary hands off Mr. Dream Boy. And off me.

Everyone was worried about what was going to happen to Dother Hall.

Jo said, “What if Phil does manage to get himself back to Woolfe and then I get sent home?”

And Vaisey said, “Jack may never carry my handbag again.”

It was all so sad. Flossie said that Sidone and Monty and the rest of the staff had been away over the weekend and got back very late on Sunday and that Bob had been in charge.

Vaisey said, “He was in his studio playing loud rock music. When he came out he said, ‘This is a bum rap, like when Iron Butterfly split, the pain was enormous.’”