Tamsin smiled and kissed his temple. She was being more affectionate than she had been for weeks, Callum realised sadly as they curved their bodies round each other in preparation for sleep.

‘Callum?’

‘Mmmm?’

‘What happened today?’

‘What?’

‘You said you’d had a bad day. I should have asked.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m such a bad girlfriend.’

‘No you’re not.’

Nine

Normandy in mid-March: a freakishly early spring, warm enough for the hardier members of 8S to swim in the river behind the large converted barn they were staying in for the week. There was a nearby farmhouse that supplied them with fresh eggs; otherwise, the barn was the only building for several miles. On the other side of the river was a track used for racing small horse-drawn chariots: the driver rode standing up with a whip in one hand and the other hand holding on to the edge of the chariot for support. They went extremely fast. ‘A very old French pastime,’ Mr Dempster explained. ‘Highly dangerous, of course, but also quite exciting, because it’s not so far from the sort of thing the Romans would have been getting up to.’

For Sophie, the week in France seemed like the start of an adulthood she hadn’t known she wanted until now. It was the longest she’d ever been away from her parents: the longest she’d ever been responsible for her own personality, unregulated and unchallenged by her mother. The scholarship exams were finally over, and all she had to do between now and September was ‘develop as a person’. These were her mother’s words. For Mrs Witrand, developing as a person meant practising the clarinet more often and getting better at French. For Sophie, it meant becoming someone at last: someone with opinions and tastes and defining characteristics. In the ferry on the way over, she joined Rhiannon and Verity on a trip to buy nail varnish at the cosmetics section of the duty-free. While Rhiannon and Verity picked out tasteful pastel shades, Sophie plumped for a weird olive-green colour.

‘Are you actually sure you want that?’ asked Verity. ‘It’s blatantly one of those ones you buy and then never wear, I’ve never seen anyone with that colour nail varnish before.’

‘Then I’ll be the first,’ said Sophie happily.

Perhaps it was the simple fact of being away from school, but for whatever reason the other girls seemed much nicer than usual. On the bus ride from Calais to the barn, Flick leaned over to Sophie and offered her a headphone.

‘Here, have a listen. I think you’ll like it, it’s sort of old-fashioned.’

Sophie frowned. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘No no, I mean it in a nice way. Listen.’

The song was ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ by Dusty Springfield. Sophie could hear immediately that it was cooler than the Beatles. Her kind of cool. She nodded along.