Dellie Leven was teaching them that afternoon, Mr Crane being indisposed.

A slim volume was pushed across the desk for Mrs Leven’s attention. It had a black shiny cover with a photograph of a white-shirted actor playing the titular role.

‘Doctor Faustus,’ Dellie read aloud, picking up the book.

Anna Duchamp quickly corrected her pronunciation – ‘It’s Fow-stus, miss, I believe, not For-stus’ – then she delivered a short summary of the play. ‘It’s about a man who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power.’ She said it so demurely, tucking her hair behind her ears.

The teacher immediately dropped the book at the mention of Old Nick, realising she’d grasped the wrong end of the poker. Dellie inwardly cursed herself. She always let the girls do this – bait her – whenever Mr Crane was away. She could never see these challenges coming or head them off at the pass. (‘Was it very painful when you first had sex?’ Jade-Marie had asked her during one lesson, apropos of nothing.)

It was Jade-Marie who spoke now, making a declaration of their intent. ‘We want to study it,’ she said, ‘and we also want to do it for the Easter show.’

It was traditional that the outgoing Sixth Formers gave a performance of their set text, a theatrical swansong before exam season began, and that set text was always A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With no students in the school year above them, the girls would, come Easter, have to don the fluted-sleeved dresses, the wire wings and the papier-mâché ass’ head to give the island its annual show. Come the Easter after that, they would have to perform it all over again.

‘No,’ Dellie Leven replied. She may have avoided confrontation with the girls in the past, turned a blind eye to their wrist bandages, for example, leaving it to poor Miss Cedars to uncover their tattoos, but on this, she claims, she was firm. ‘We will not be using that blasphemous book. Absolutely not. And think how disappointed the little ones will be, come Easter, if they don’t get to see The Mechanicals.’

Dellie’s only error, perhaps, was not to confiscate the offending book, not to notice when Britta Sayers slid it back into her bag. She might have demanded it from them later, if the girls hadn’t returned so diligently to their discussions of meddling fairies, debating the rights and wrongs of making Titania fall in love with a donkey, and more earnestly, the reasons why the young people in the play decided that what happened to them should be considered a dream.

It was Saul Cooper who was challenged on the matter of the intruding play text. His log of the Kendricks’ incoming property had them arriving with an embarrassment of books. Had the Customs Officer checked every title? Could he swear on his ageing mother’s life that not a wrong one had made it through?