A moment went past. Nikki shook her head without lifting it from the cradle of her arms. Then she said, muffled, “Dr Walden, I’m really sorry, can I—can I go to the nurse?”

“I’ll look after her,” said Aneeta at once.

Problems, priorities: an A-level lesson on a key topic still in progress, Will and Mathias alone in the seminar room, Aneeta trying to take on too much responsibility, Nikki an emotional wreck on the floor of the disabled toilet. Walden was not formally on the pastoral team. She didn’t even have a registration group—when would she have time? The chain of command for Nikki’s current state went form tutor, head of sixth form, pastoral deputy head—which was Ebele. But every child was every adult’s responsibility. “I’m going to walk you down to the nurse, Nikki,” Walden said, “and then I’m going to put my head round the door of the pastoral office and let Matron know what’s going on, all right? Aneeta, if you go back to the lesson, the others will explain the revision sheet we’re doing.”

Early in her career, Walden had still been sensitive to awkwardness. Interactions between adults and children were so often so awkward. They lived in the same world as you—exactly the same world, the same corridors and classrooms, the same bells ringing out the hours of the timetable—and yet in a world that was nothing like yours at all. The difference between a schoolchild and a schoolteacher, one of Walden’s mentors had once remarked, is that a teacher who finds herself miserable at school can leave.

Fourteen years, that was the length of a modern English education: Reception to Year Thirteen. Fourteen years of corridors, classrooms, bells. Fourteen years of rules and restrictions and uniform requirements. Fourteen years of being told what to do. It was not surprising that children sometimes behaved badly at school. It was not surprising that they refused to do the work, or had emotional outbursts; that they made nasty jokes, or looked at you now and then with a silent, resentful sneer. You had a great deal of power, and they had almost none. You had many choices, and they had very few. The truth was that school—especially boarding school—could be a bit like the old joke about marriage: fine, for people who like living in institutions.