During the second verse of that morning’s hymn, the point in the song when the dancing spreads to the fishermen, Jade-Marie raised her voice to match the registers of the younger children. By the third verse, when the dancer in all unreasonableness is strung up after curing the lame, Jade-Marie was no longer singing but bellowing the words, engulfing the operatic harmonies of Mr Crane’s wife, Diana.

Britta and Anna, standing either side of Jade, lowered their hymn books, held only for appearance’s sake as they knew the words off by heart, and they stared. It was Britta who laughed, just a small cough of embarrassment, though she soon turned serious and ashen like Anna. An understanding began to throb between the three girls as the fourth verse arrived, as Jade-Marie’s voice grew yet wilder with pain:

I danced on a Friday

When the world turned black –

It’s hard to dance

With the devil on your back.

A tear spilled down Anna’s cheek. Britta’s chest rose and fell in hitching gasps.

This was when Miss Cedars, the nice, polite teacher of the GCSE pupils, leapt from her pew and, with uncommon ferocity, yanked Jade-Marie from her place, the girl’s hymn book hitting the stone floor with a slap. Teacher and pupil then wrestled their way down the aisle, Jade-Marie screaming the last lines of the fourth verse, as if issuing a final threat:

They buried my body

And they thought I’d gone,

But I am the Dance

And I still go on.

Then she was pushed out into daylight beyond the ironwork door.

Mrs Stanney at the organ continued to play at her usual sprightly pace, but the infant classes, who had never seen such behaviour in their entire lives, fell silent, their mouths forming little Os. Mr Crane slammed the spine of his hymn book against the lectern, issuing a clipped instruction to ‘Sing!’ The infants leapt in unison, then shrank small, searching for the words for verse five – words that would soon, like so many hymns and prayers and quotations, become second nature to them.

One of the boys who walked close to Britta and Anna along the cliffside path back to school after worship, said that the girls had discussed, in whispers, not returning to their classroom. They would fall behind the last teacher, slip into the graveyard, make a hiding place of one of the tilting tombs, then skirt the edge of the nunnery to make their escape across estate land… but this plan was discarded as hastily as it was put together.

They had to go back. They had to be there for their friend. She was in the headmaster’s office, with Miss Cedars her jailer. Mr Crane would return, Miss Cedars would be asked to leave, and then what?

And then what?

The Book of Leah

THE BOOK OF LEAH

In the beginning, I considered peroxide.