The slower ones, the dreamier ones, mouthing whatever came into their heads, but carried along by the others. She hadn’t liked to force them. For some children that part of the brain just isn’t switched on at eight. It’s not laziness or stupidity. Really stupid children were a rarity, and she used to tell her young teachers, ‘Never write a child off. Never assume the problem is theirs rather than yours.’ There was no great mystery to it. Alec, for example, sitting at the front of the class like a baby owl, his eyes magnified by his glasses, his hair sticking up in tufts, had never had the slightest difficulty learning French. Partly, of course, because in the beginning she was his teacher and he so desperately wanted to please her, a trait charming and irksome by turns and which he had never really grown out of. She had heard the same tone in his voice telling her about the new play as he used to have when he brought her his homework, as though at any moment he might be squashed by an enormous thumb. Well done, Alec. Good boy. Go and find Larry. Je suis, tu es, il est. Larry’s kingdom was the sports field. Captain of cricket. Captain of football. And later, as a senior, captain of the tennis team. Such a manly little boy! And she had always been there, cheering herself hoarse on the touchline, or courtside at tournaments that grew ever grander, her heart in her mouth as he swayed at the baseline and the boy at the far end reached into the air for the ball. The day he beat the Swede, whose name she seemed to have completely forgotten, had been the proudest day of her life. She had wanted to shout out from the stands so that the whole world would hear: ‘I’m the mother! I’m the mother!’ It was difficult for Alec, of course. The inevitable comparisons. Always being introduced as ‘Larry’s brother’ as though he didn’t have a name of his own. But she had doled out her love as evenly as possible. There had been no obvious favourite.