‘Oh yes? What did you do?’

‘I tried to speak to them.’

Miss Holmes laughed. ‘Well, that’s where you made your first mistake,’ she said. ‘You’re very nice to look at, Nelson, but you don’t help your cause when you open your mouth.’

Nelson stared at her, the memory of his unexpected goal vanishing now. He wanted to ask her why she needed to be so unkind, but that would take words and he knew that he would not be able to find any. Instead, he simply looked down at his hands and examined the lines on his palms, as if he’d learned how to read the future and was eager to discover whether he’d live a long life and, if he did, would he find happiness.

At the front of the room, the headmaster clapped his hands together and asked for silence. As conversations came to a halt and all faces turned in his direction, Nelson felt a stab of anxiety at the pit of his stomach. Announcements always made him nervous. They rarely held anything but bad news.

‘I’m afraid I have something rather unpleasant to report,’ said Mr Pepford, looking around at the teachers, who, unlike Nelson, brightened up whenever an unexpected event occurred. A resignation, a sacking, a death. Anything to liven up an otherwise tedious Tuesday. ‘We have a Code Purple in Year 10.’

There was a collective groan from around the room and Malachy Stout, the form tutor for that particular group, smacked his right fist down on the arm of his chair, causing one or two people near him to jump in surprise. ‘Fuck’s sake!’ he roared. ‘Fucking fuck’s sake!’

‘Yes, thank you, Malachy,’ said the headmaster. ‘We don’t need to make a bad situation worse with vulgar language, do we?’

‘Who is it?’ asked Miss Holmes.

‘Sarah Wilmot,’ said the head.

‘What, again? She’s only just back from having her last sprog.’

‘It seems that she has quite the maternal streak. She’s turning into the Mia Farrow of St Thomas’s.’

‘And which poor bastard has got her up the duff this time?’ asked Malachy.

‘That seems to be the subject of some speculation at the moment,’ the head replied. ‘There are a number of suspects in the frame but, as of this morning, Sarah has declined to name her seducer.’

Martin Rice burst out laughing. ‘Her seducer,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We’re not in a Jane Austen novel, you know.’

‘So I think we should all be on the alert for a certain amount of tension in the Year 10 group over the days and weeks ahead,’ continued Mr Pepford, ignoring this remark but smiling in Martin’s direction to make it clear that they were still besties. ‘The boys are all denying their part in these unhappy events while insisting that they could not be the father as they always use prophylactics. It seems they want to assert their sexual prowess while taking no responsibility for the results of any congress.’