Remember they’re all bitches, Rose. The crack grinned, lopsided. Wizened little cunts. Fat fucking liars, all of them.

‘Rose!’ said Mrs Jackson.

Mrs Jackson’s voice was sharp. Rose tore her eyes away and stared, blinking, at the head teacher. She was tall and narrow and tightly bound in a suit and jacket. Her face was hard, witchy, polished at the high cheekbones and on the ridge of the long nose. A glint of light caught the tip of it.

‘Would you like a biscuit?’ said Mrs Jackson.

It felt like a test.

The head teacher’s eyes had given nothing away. Rose had looked down at the plate, trying to figure out the answer. There were so many custard creams that they were piled on top of each other. After a moment, Mrs Jackson had pushed the plate gently towards her fingers.

‘Take one,’ she had said.

The edge of the door is hard behind her back. The jar is cold in her hand.

Sometimes it seems to Rose that everything is a test. The world is run by rules no one has told her. They haven’t even told her what they haven’t told her.

And right now she is so hungry she can’t think straight.

Maybe it might happen again. She might faint, and wake up, and Mrs Jackson will lie her on the sofa in the office and feed her custard creams and they will give her a house.

This house.

The front door clicks open.

Titch doesn’t know why she goes to church. It’s part of her routine here. She would never go in London. When she’s here, it just seems right. The church is a hundred yards away, and as you walk through the wooden gate, through the old part of the graveyard, where the stones lean, mossy and worn, and in at the damp porch where old notices moulder on the corkboard and the flagstones have the faint tracings of someone’s life and death, you are part of something very English. It is worth preserving, she thinks.

When she drives through the new housing estate, with its neat narrow geometric blocks, its clean brick, its forest of black-tiled roofs, she feels a sadness inside for a gentler past, one with fewer sharp edges.

She feels old, sometimes. She works with young people, and although she’s not old – not yet – it can seem like she’s slowly fading from view. She is slower than they are. She looks sometimes at them, at Rachael and Jacqui, at Archie, and she is amazed by how much they want, and how quickly. When she was their age, she couldn’t begin to afford some of the designers they wear. She drove an old banger, not a cute little Mini on lease.