Robyn could hear laughter in the background, and intuited that the most divine woman on the planet might well be on the next sun-lounger to Victoria. ‘Good!’ she said. ‘Sounds like a happy ending to me. Anyway, I was just ringing – and honestly, this can wait until you’re back – but—’

‘You were ringing to see if there was any work that might be going for you at the uni?’ Victoria guessed. ‘Oh, mate, I would love to have you back on the team! Let me think . . . Well, Alfonso has just taken a sabbatical at the moment, so there’s potentially some kind of vacancy there. We’ve got a maternity leave coming up as well, so . . . Exciting! Let me see what strings I can pull when I’m back in Blighty.’

‘Oh!’ Robyn felt excited, too. She had hardly dared get her hopes up, but it really did sound as if there might be a way back for her. ‘Thank you, that would be amazing. I can update my CV and send it over or—’

‘You don’t need to update your CV, I know how talented and fabulous you are,’ Victoria told her. ‘Look, I’m back in August, why don’t we hook up then and talk through what we’d both like from the arrangement? I’m sure we can make it work between us, all right? Cool. Good to have you back. Hey, and listen: don’t forget the scrambled eggs. That will be a key part of your interview, by the way – you telling me how you wreaked your terrible revenge on the ass-wipe. Got it?’

Robyn laughed again. Victoria was definitely a bit worse for wear. She hoped her old boss would actually remember the work part of this conversation when she sobered up. ‘Sadly, I don’t have the address of his new love-nest, so the scrambled-egg option is out of the question,’ she replied, deadpan, pointing a warning finger at a Year Nine and miming to her that she needed to unroll the top of her school skirt, which she had gathered up so that it was more like a school belt. ‘But I’ll do my best,’ she added, not wanting Victoria to think she’d gone soft.

‘You’d better. And you have a great summer, now. Ciao!’

‘Bye,’ said Robyn, hanging up. Then she marvelled for a few glorious seconds that there might still be this small pocket of the universe where she belonged, where she was respected, where she was told she was fabulous. A place where she didn’t have to police smoking and snogging students, where she didn’t have to nag on about skirt lengths and too much flicky eye make-up. But in the meantime . . . ‘Sasha Higginbotham, will you pull that skirt down to its proper length, please,’ she bellowed, striding back down towards the school building as the bell rang for afternoon lessons.