Jane bustled up to them with a tray of her precious nibbles. ‘So how are we getting on? Grilling the new boss, Shona? Have you found out that Dermot here speaks five languages! What are they now, Dermot? Let me try to remember. English, Castilian, Catalan, German … and what was the other one, Dermot dear?’ She fluttered her pale blonde eyelashes at him.

‘Italian, but really not as fluently as the others,’ Dermot replied with a smile, his composure regained.

‘I speak five languages, too,’ Shona said, but in a gentle tone and with a smile, so it didn’t sound like an assertion or a challenge, but an expression of kinship. She made her excuses and went over to the buffet table to join Jonty, the corpulent English master, who was eagerly hoovering up the prawn thingies without any concern for niceties or mingling.

A couple of weeks after Mr O’Connor’s arrival, Shona would have hoped that everything might settle back into the normal, comforting routine. However, it still wasn’t quite normal. Although you couldn’t exactly call Dermot good-looking, his natural charm and the ease with which he talked to the women in the staffroom had many of them, regardless of age or marital status, almost fighting for his attention, offering to make him cups of tea and asking solicitously after his classes. Young Ms Adams in particular, an attractive singleton in her early thirties, had developed a thumping crush on him, which she was convinced he reciprocated. ‘He always asks how I am, every time he comes into the staffroom. What do you think that means?’ she confided in Shona, with a mixture of triumph and uncertainty, reapplying her lipstick before Mr O’Connor came back after his class.

Shona replied reassuringly, ‘I think it means he wants to know how you are.’ She didn’t add that he was the friendly type who made sure to ask everyone how they were, sometimes to the point of silliness.

‘Exactly!’ said Pam Adams, ‘That’s exactly what I think.’ She looked expectantly at the clock, as she had memorized Dermot’s schedule and knew exactly when he would walk back through the heavy oak door.