“You do realize, Chloe, that student performance is under review, don’t you, and at the end of the year, which is not far off, not at all far off, you could simply—well, not to mince matters, be asked not to come back in October?”

I had a picture, not a very pleasant one, of matters being minced, of a long strip of flesh, maybe a fillet of pork, pushed through a food processor. Nothing was going to take me back to GUP for a second year, but October was a long way off, all kinds of things could happen before October. All kinds of things did, though not what I meant when I vaguely considered the future that morning in Selina’s yellow drawing room. Mostly, though, I thought how a whole week would pass before I need go back.

I half-expected a summons from Max and one came, brought of course by Selina, just as I was off to meet Silver in the café on the bridge at Maida Hill. Instead of his study Max was in the dining room, where that first evening I had had dinner with them. Since then, as Beryl had foretold, it had been redecorated. Below ground I had scarcely noticed the comings and goings of builders. But they had been there and done the room in the colors, as Beryl put it, of a can of Heinz baked beans, wallpaper in bright peacock blue and black, dazzling white paintwork. The old black carpet looked deeper and darker than before. Still seated at the table, from which all the lunch things but the small coffee cup in front of him had been cleared away, Max looked at me over the top of the gold-rimmed glasses which had slid down his nose, chin tucked in, round jowls prominent. When he had made sure it was me and not some intruder, ghost, or hallucination, he pushed the glasses back to the bridge of his nose with both hands and held them there while he stared, lips pursed. He was wearing one of his tracksuits, pants in a pale shade of cocoa, top in cocoa and bitter chocolate stripes.

It’s a successful technique with those weaker or younger or more vulnerable than yourself whom you seek to control: look at them for some seconds without speaking while wearing a expression of deep disapproval, delaying as long as is reasonable what there is to say. I had experienced a lot of it in my short life and usually I had sat there under the censorious scrutiny, taking it mutinously but in silence. But we change fast at twenty and I had changed since coming to Russia Road. I said as firmly as I could, “Please don’t look at me like that, Max. I know you’re angry with me and I’m sorry, but would you just come out and say it?”