He paced around forcefully between the lamps, making these arrangements; the women, dazed and collapsed, were grateful to him really. He was fearless and competent, he knew what to do. He told Christine to telephone the school where he worked in the morning, explain why he wouldn’t be in. Before he left he kissed both the women, touching their faces with his fingertips in that intimate way he had. But they also knew that he was craving movement, couldn’t bear the idea of staying there in the flat with them while they mulled over this sorrow, fermenting it.

Alex had actually been a headmaster – in a local primary school, where the kids spoke thirty-two languages between them and forty-eight per cent were on free meals. When he got the headmaster’s job it had seemed like the inevitable destination of his career as an inspiring, progressive teacher, adored by the children. But in fact it had made him unhappy, and after three years he’d returned to being a classroom teacher with a class of nine-year-olds, never regretted it. Under his urbane, appealing surface, Alex wasn’t really a public man as Zachary was. He was too intolerant when he was thwarted, driving his enemies into bitter opposition. Really he was a solitary thinker, not interested in most of his colleagues. The vision he had for the school – with children as thinkers and artists at its core – went needless to say against the grain of public policy on education. It went against the way the world worked. And unlike Zachary, Alex had no conviction that progress was possible, or that you could build any institution into a power for good. There was a contradiction, Christine thought, between his passionate scepticism and his commitment to the children’s education. He didn’t believe that anything could get better, and was often despairing – yet he dedicated himself to building and nourishing their imaginations, as if hope depended on it. She also sometimes thought, when she was angry with him, that when they left his class he forgot them.