Sharing a pillow in the early hours, we compared our lives. I’d grown up with a younger brother, he an older sister. His dad had left his mother and married someone else when Ben was a teenager. A man deserting his family like that shocked no one on the mainland anymore. I told him about my father, the gamekeeper, and his decision a few months before to step down from the early work to set a path for retirement, and how he now resisted those plans as if they had been made by a rival, one plotting his downfall. My mother was losing her patience.

‘We often run away from the very thing we know will make us happy,’ Ben said and we smiled at this, at his efforts at playing the sage, but also because we thought ourselves victorious. Look at us, we were saying with those smiles, we’re not like everybody else. We had grabbed what we wanted. I reached out across the island of my bed to feel the warmth of his skin: proof.

We could have built our relationship gradually, I knew that – done things properly, in the right order, not leapt immediately into the delight of our bodies, yet how easily we could have slipped through each other’s fingers. He was my Knight of Cups and I was proud of myself for snatching hold of him, without question.

In the early hours, one chilly October morning, he said: ‘You need to help me out with something…’

He was twisting a strand of my hair between his fingers, weaving a black line of it up and over his knuckles. I thought he was going to ask me to steal something else for that lab of his, the one burgeoning in the corner of the lower seniors classroom.

‘What’s the deal with the Eldest Girls?’ he asked.

I rolled onto an elbow to face him, my hair pulling free of his grasp.

‘That is what you call them, isn’t it?’ he went on. ‘I’ve heard people say it, like it’s a band name or –’

‘It’s just what they are. They’re the eldest.’

‘– like they’re some kind of legend.’

I paused. His expression was strange in the moonlight, oddly transfixed. Dreamy.

Familiar.

I knew how the girls were talked about now. They’d come of age, they were women, beautiful, soon ripe for the picking. The idea of it withered me instantly, aged me a thousand years. Ben was not supposed to see them like that. He was supposed to see them as I did – as pupils, girls. Just young girls.

‘What do you mean, “the deal”?’ I said, sitting up, wrapping a blanket tightly around myself. This wasn’t a conversation to have naked.

‘Well, you hauled one of them out of chapel on the first day of school,’ he said. His speech was tentative now; he’d noticed the way I had stiffened.