Ms. Gisborne kept up a kind of sales patter. Once the school had been run by a teaching order of nuns. During the comprehensivization of Britain’s schools they had left, or been driven out, depending on your point of view. “Although we still have contacts with them,” Ms. Gisborne said. “And with a number of other Catholic groupings. Since Gina’s time, as I said, we have closed down our preschool section, and merged administratively with a large boys’ school half a mile away. We now provide what would have been called sixth-form support in your day—sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Our academic record is good, and . . .”

I suspected she was as bored with me as I was of her, and that half her mind was elsewhere, engaged with the endless, complex task of running the place.

The most spectacular new building turned out to be a chapel. It had a concrete roof of elaborate curves. It turned out this was intended to model the tents within which Moses’s flock lived while crossing the desert. Beneath that startling roof the interior space was bright, littered with fragments of red and gold from the long stained-glass windows, and there was a smell of incense.

I felt oddly uncomfortable. The school still retained its profoundly religious core, within a shell of reform and renovation, persisting through the decades, an old, dark thing surviving.

Ms. Gisborne seemed to sense my unease, and from that moment in the chapel she grew oddly hostile.

“Tell me—when was the last time you were in a church?”

“Two weeks ago, for my father’s funeral,” I said, a bit harshly.

“I’m sorry,” she said evenly. “Was your parents’ faith strong?”

“Yes. But I’m not my parents.”

“Do you regret having had a Catholic education?”

“I don’t know. It was such a huge part of my life—I can’t imagine how I might have turned out if I hadn’t.”

“You will have left school with a strong moral sense, a sense of something bigger than you are. Even if you reject the answers, you keep the questions: Where did I come from, where am I going? What does my life mean?” She was smiling, her face strong and assured. “Whether you turn away from the faith or not, at least you have been exposed to its reality and potential. Isn’t that a legacy worth taking away?”

“Do you think your secretary will have finished by now?”

“More than likely. You know, I’m surprised you came here, searching for this mysterious ’sister.’ “

“Why? Where else would I go?”

“To your family, of course. To Gina. Perhaps you aren’t very close. Pity.” She led the way out of the chapel, back across the compound to the main block.