Irene used to be a primary school teacher, but now she taught dyslexic children and, more rarely, dyslexic adults. She worked in a large cold room on the first floor of a large grey house in the north of London, belonging to the Quakers. The room had a bar fire, a blackboard on the wall, a box of shabby cast-off toys under the table and a bay window that overlooked an unsatisfactory park where litter and dead leaves were blown up by the wind. Over the years she had become familiar with the people who walked through the park, or who sat on the two benches with their sandwiches and books. She knew the woman who was tugged through it by her two red setters straining at their leashes; the tramp with the flaming face and boiled blue eyes who arrived on the dot of eleven every day with his supermarket trolley full of bulging plastic bags, and sat motionless on the furthest bench, staring fixedly at the stunted rose bushes as if he had learnt how to protect himself from people’s disgusted glances by turning himself into just another shabby object in the urban landscape; the thin, dark man in spectacles who every lunch hour came with his newspaper, his plastic container of salad and a green apple that he would polish on his trouser leg before biting into it.

On Monday mornings, she commonly did assessments of new pupils that the educational psychologist had sent to her from the local comprehensives, asking them to write down simple spellings, telling them to repeat lists of numbers, or to isolate sounds in a word. She would watch as they struggled over the tasks, wrestling with their pens, forming wrenched and tortured approximations of letters that toppled down the page, fighting to arrive at meaning through the obscuring fog in their heads, their faces screwed up in agonized concentration. On the other days, apart from Friday mornings, she would teach, usually two children at a time. There was often no one but them in the old house, and sometimes, when the children were bent over their work sheets, there was a heavy, soporific quality to the silence. The scratch of pens, the click of counters, faint rustle as pages were turned; a child fidgeting in his seat, scratching his hot, bewildered head.

She normally stopped work at half past five in the afternoon and it took her twenty-five minutes to pack her teaching tools into the pannier, pull on her yellow waterproof jacket and bike along the busy roads to the childminder – cars hooting and exhausts belching out yellow smoke – and then walk the short stretch home; maybe a bit longer in the winter, when the darkness and cold made the journey feel more of an effort, and water from the puddles would spray up round her wheels, splattering her legs with mud and seeping into her shoes.