Perspective. Is that what I lack? In the old days, we ran on instinct. But now we have guidelines to follow, for our safety and that of the boys. Between them, Bob Strange and Dr. Devine have removed the peril from teaching. Never speak to a boy alone. Always keep the door ajar. No physical contact with boys, not even to offer comfort (or, as Eric would have preferred, to clip them around the ear). No fraternizing at the pub, as generations of gym teachers were wont to do in Harry’s day. No impromptu trips, or at least, not without risk assessments, consent forms, dietary sheets, and a mass of assorted paperwork designed to predict (and likely, prevent) any possible diversion from the humdrum. And yet, as any Master knows who doesn’t spend his time staring at a computer, teaching is the essence of risk, the home of the unpredictable. There is no risk assessment for Life. And Life is what we are teaching.

• • •

I walked home through the park again, hearing the sounds of night in the trees. The cold air smelled of woodsmoke; the leaves were wet beneath my feet. I’d almost reached the end of the park, where Millionaires’ Row turns on to Westgate. A little group of teenage boys in hooded sweatshirts and knitted hats were standing under the lamppost near the swing set in the children’s playground, looking up to no good. Of course, that’s how teenage boys always look whenever adults are around. It’s a kind of default setting, composed partly of guilt and partly of resentment. But sullenness breeds more of the same, and I have always made a point of treating teenagers the same way I would treat any adult. My boys tend to appreciate it, and although I could see that this little group was made up of Sunnybankers, I assumed that they would too.

I smiled and said: “Good evening.”

The boys said nothing, but stared at me. One of them, a freckled boy with long hair under his knitted cap and a cigarette stub between his fingers, smirked and said something under his breath. The other boys sniggered unpleasantly.

The freckled boy said: “Pervert.”

I felt a trickle of unease, all the more galling for the fact that I was on my own ground, less than three hundred yards from home. But boys are like house cats, gentle by day, unpredictable by night. A schoolmaster, on the other hand, is always a schoolmaster: at home; in town; in the post office queue; in the park in the evening. Boys do not really believe, deep down, that Masters have a life outside St. Oswald’s. They secretly imagine us hanging like bats, upside down in our stockrooms, emerging only to mark books, to collect detention slips, or to hatch inscrutably evil schemes to bring about the downfall of the young.