‘They’re not really loaded. They get a special rate for the girls’ school fees, because he teaches there. Anyway, he likes it. He likes getting all the attention from the pupils, the girls especially. He’s a bit of a cult figure at school. He takes everyone to the pub in Truro and buys them ciders. Lets them smoke in art classes. Does an autumn trip to London, to the Tate and the National Gallery. You can imagine how he likes standing in front of some huge old painting, explaining it to everyone. Most summers he takes a group out to Italy, to see the pictures. He does Rome one year, Florence the next, so the A-level students can go on both. He hasn’t done it this year, I’m not sure why not. Maybe there weren’t enough pupils doing art history.’

‘Have you seen his feet?’

‘No! He always wears those little boots, doesn’t he?’

‘In his studio the other day he had bare feet and some of his toenails were painted, different colours.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘No. Honest truth.’

‘When you say “some of them”, what do you mean?’

‘Well, you know, some of them. Just two or three on each foot.’

They both began to laugh. ‘Do you think Celia does them for him?’

‘Ew, creepy,’ said Helena.

‘He’s actually really nice,’ said Stephen.

‘Yeah, he is. I’ve been coming here since me and Georgie were first friends, when I came to the school four years ago. He’s always really generous. They’re great, the way they never interfere, they just let you do what you like. Compared to my parents. I can’t move at home without my mother asking me where I’m going or what I’m doing.’

‘How come you go to school so far away from where you live?’

‘I had older cousins who came here. My mother thought it’d be more fun for me than being an only child in London. She’s at work a lot.’

‘Do you get, you know, lonely?’

‘I did at first. You get used to it. Cass and Georgie are lucky, they’re day-pupils.’

Helena was meant to be going back to London, but she kept putting it off. Her parents were divorced and her father was taking her – together with his two younger children from his new marriage – to the South of France: she’d have to go in time for the trip. But for now there were three days in a row when the sun shone and it was hot; real summer heat, the kind of hot that Stephen recognized, when the backs of your knees stuck to the sticky plastic of the car seats.

‘You should’ve been here last summer, in the drought. It was boiling,’ Georgie told him.

‘It was the best summer ever,’ said Cass.

‘We all know why you thought it was,’ Georgie taunted.