They’d managed to get a picture of this one in her school uniform. Some type of nautical-themed jacket with white piping down the seams and on the pockets. A skirt and a pie-shaped hat. She looked ridiculous; it must be a good school. On impulse, and taking an interest for the first time, he decided to check where the school was: the girl lived somewhere called Middle Rosen, Lincolnshire. The story had her name – Elaine Phillips – but not her school’s. Switching to Google Maps, he searched for ‘private girls’ schools’ in the area.

Of course Lincolnshire was far too far away for his own girls, but maybe it was this one: Stamford High School. The uniforms looked different in the site’s pictures of eager, high-achieving pupils, and it seemed to be mixed, but he clicked through anyway to find the discreetly concealed section on fees: £4,675 per term for day pupils. Unambiguously beyond the reach of what he could pay; especially so if his career had already reached the phase where he was moving down the hierarchy rather than up. It was £8,250 for boarders.

A dull pain expanded in his chest. The school his girls went to was, naturally, in a catchment area slightly more expensive than he could afford. That was why he and Louise had chosen to live there – because it meant that the girls Elsa and Jenny sat next to in class weren’t Sharons and Traceys but rather Augustas and Octavias or, he admitted to himself, at least Cecilies and Floras. And when they left school, those other girls’ dads would be able to connect them with the cushy careers that it was a pleasure for the established middle classes to arrange for one another. No drudgery, no trudging, for them. The thought of his girls feeling every day how he sometimes felt… It was unbearable.

And a private school would be better, a boarding school: the uniforms, the slang, the obscure games and the careers that those girls’ fathers would have in their gift. But he would never be able to pay for it, not even if he didn’t eat and went back to working extra shifts at the Beast on Sunday. He’d done that for nine years after Jenny was born. An extra double shift, 11–11, every Saturday for nine years. When he thought about it now, it staggered him. The sheer number of birthday parties and play dates and painting afternoons he’d only heard about, not seen. Almost all of them, really. One year, he and Louise had tried postponing Jenny’s birthday so her father could be there; but she’d hated it so much they’d done it to Elsa only out of fairness and then stopped. He looked at the photos instead.