Saul Cooper had certainly been misled. He had taken to leaving the Customs House for a walk at the same time as I left the cottage to go to school – an accident he repeated every morning. I was civil, I said, ‘Hello’, but he wanted more.

‘Leah,’ he called after me. ‘Leah, Leah, Leah’, as I walked on and ignored him.

His bitter edge had gone, pared away by what we’d done. He smiled, and not sardonically. I’d achieved an uneasy peace with the events of that night, but it had been hard won. I could not let in fresh guilt, let myself believe that I owed him.

I set him straight.

‘It’s Miss Cedars,’ I shot back one morning, swivelling on my heels. The rain was heavy, water gushing down the hill and swilling around our feet. Michael Signal was there, out early as seemed to be his way, too fascinated by our exchange.

‘My name – Mr Cooper – is Miss Cedars,’ I said, making clear to all present the nature of our relationship, then I continued up that path that flowed like a river.

Ben and I took lunch together in the school canteen, although not too often. When a piece of your personal information becomes pupil currency, there is a power shift in the classroom; you lose control. The Eldest Girls noticed these lunch dates, of course; they obsessively tracked Ben’s movements. He had generously given them his ear and now they seemed to think they owned him. When we sat together to eat, the girls positioned themselves at a table in my eyeline and regarded me solemnly, picking at their food, rubbing at the indelible tattoos now healed at their wrists.

‘They’re watching us,’ I whispered across the table.

‘Who?’ he asked. ‘The Russians?’

I didn’t understand that this was a joke.

‘The Eldest Girls,’ I said, a hand across my mouth so they couldn’t read my lips.

‘You’re imagining it,’ he replied.

But I wasn’t. I wasn’t imagining it.

He changed the subject, by asking me to go to the Billet House for our next date.

I refused. ‘No, that will be far too weird, being in that house full of men, having them all laugh, Reuben Springer and –’

‘Reuben’s not like that,’ Ben cut in.

‘– and Abe Powell and Saul Cooper and –’

I tried to make it sound casual, but he grabbed at the name: ‘Saul Cooper?’

There was an awful pause.

‘Yes,’ I said, wondering how I might confess, how it could ever be made to sound acceptable. We had broken up, and I was drunk, and you have slept with other people before me so…

‘There’s no Saul Cooper living with us,’ he said.

‘Yes, there is!’ My voice had risen. It came in a series of squawks. ‘I mean, where else would he be living?’