Nathan sank into despondency. They had no idea what it was like to face the future alone, he said: the unmade bed, old VHS recordings of French films, supermarket meals for one. He longed, he said, for the civilising influence of women. His friends were familiar with this phase of his mood, when he let himself fall into the safety net of their sympathy. When Nathan had actually had girlfriends, he’d panicked at the invasion of his privacy – of his den in Shepherd’s Bush whose ancient carpet smelled of dog although he’d never had one, and of his idiosyncratic routines: staying up till dawn, sleeping till noon. While everyone else grew out of the sordid spontaneity of youth, it had become his middle-aged fixed habit.

— You could try making your bed, Christine suggested.

Nonetheless the women preened in the light of Nathan’s admiration for their married lives, then drifted from wifely maturity into reminiscence of their schooldays. — You can’t have forgotten Miss Lowrie, Lydia insisted to Christine. — Creepy and fleshy, with goggle glasses.

— Biology lab?

— Gold watch cutting into her fat wrists. Ghastly malevolent axolotls snapping at rulers when we poked into their tank, and that tall cupboard with rows of jars, foetuses floating in formaldehyde.

— Lyd, they weren’t actually foetuses.

— Oh, I’m enjoying the foetuses, Nathan said. — Presumably an endless supply, from disgraced ex-pupils.

What Christine seemed to remember was pairs and threes of schoolgirls in bottle-green uniform, heads bowed in gossip, circling unceasingly around the great cedar in the grounds. The sheer tedium had been its own opaque medium, through which time barely moved. — Because at its root it wasn’t morally right, I suppose. Because the whole business of that school was separating people out to think a lot of themselves just because they had more money. Or, for the free-place girls like us, because we were clever in examinations. Entitlement was always in the air, even while they were breaking us cruelly down, in order for us to earn it.

— You exaggerate the cruelty.

Alex had no time for their protests over how hard they’d been made to work. The work was the good bit, he thought, in that kind of school; it was the boarding which was for barbarians. But Lydia insisted: this was her subject and she wouldn’t be deflected, even by Alex. — It was worse than she says. What was worse was how the other girls queued up for it. For the entitlement of course: but also, to be broken down. It excited them: being tamed and humiliated and sorted into ranks. Whereas Chris and I, you know, used to read the Communist Manifesto in our dinner break.