It was like a jolt of a thousand volts to the boy. He leapt to his feet. The leather satchel that was still slung across his body snagged him at the neck, and he readjusted it primly, pulling it forwards to mask his crotch.

‘What are you doing?’ he yelped.

‘I thought… You said you wanted to… I thought we were going to… have sex?’

He blustered and scoffed. He was embarrassed, she could tell.

‘Well, that’s as may be,’ he said, playing the adult, ‘but that’s not how it happens. You were doing it all wrong.’

‘Sorry,’ she found herself saying reflexively, immediately doubting herself.

‘No, that wasn’t right at all,’ he went on, growing in assurance.

She straightened her jumper and the bra beneath it, humiliated. ‘Why wasn’t it?’ she dared to ask. ‘Why wasn’t it right?’

‘You are supposed to be more ladylike,’ he said, speaking with utmost confidence now. ‘Sex is something a man does to a woman, not the other way around.’

The Book of Leah

THE BOOK OF LEAH

It was a blessing in disguise. The end of something is always the beginning of something else. They had gifted me time to focus, to renew my belief in the lectures I delivered to departing friends – Lark is not the problem, because we are Lark. We are its future!

This was my opportunity to make it so.

I had to accept that teaching was no way for me to shape the young, just as Saul Cooper, Robert Signal and Father Daniel had discovered that a seat on the Council was no way for them to steer the island. We were relying on old systems, creaking at the joints, manipulated and used. It was time to build something new, if we were ever to be rid of the rot, to be free from our very bad apples.

To my enemies, I was a delusional woman who shouted in the street, a woman too scared to stay in her own cottage because of a splash of red paint. I could be easily dismissed, and they would never see me coming.

My mother and I began to pack. We knew someone would come soon to tell us that our tenure at the gamekeeper’s lodge was up. We didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing us taken by surprise. By the time that Council dogsbody arrived, grubby fingers on some piece of spurious paperwork, everything of ours would be in boxes, ready to go.

‘But where will we go?’ my mother asked, as we wrapped artichoke-shaped candle-holders and bubbled-glass vases. I lifted down my framed teacher training certificate from the living-room wall, revealing a rectangle of light-starved wallpaper. I tried not to think about whether I would use this qualification again. I hushed the echo of Paul in my head asking, Will you actually be a real teacher?