“I never suspected you of egalitarian principles,” Mark said. “I thought you were all professional pride down to the bottom of your magician’s heart.”

“Some of us picked a career out of the desire to do something important,” Walden said. “Something real.”

“Teaching four teenagers a niche A-level at a private school,” Mark agreed. “Makes sense.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m a meaningless sort of guy.”

“I can tell,” said Walden coldly.

“Don’t hold it against me. I might have hidden depths. Are you coming to the afterparty?”

“What afterparty?” But now Walden looked, the crowd of teachers was starting to thin: sensible people in their forties and fifties peeling off for the Tube and the train ride home, dragging out wheeled suitcases from the collection by the door as they set off for their real lives, their families, Christmas. Boarding school was a world apart. It wasn’t only the children who exited the theme park at the end of term.

“There’s a bunch of us going to head into town and find somewhere less sad than Finsbury Park to keep the party going,” Mark said. Us, as if he were right in with the energetic young crowd also starting to collect their coats and hats. He had to be ten years older than most of them, twenty years older than someone like Lilly. “Are you in?”

What was waiting for Walden at the other end of her own train ride home? Chetwood, of course; Chetwood again; the theme park with the lights off, everything shut down, a Victorian flat too big for one person to rattle around in and a school site left empty and leafless and grim. She wouldn’t be completely alone. Of course not. Ebele and Ezekiel lived in School House with their crowd of foster children; and their adult children, all successful twenty-something alumni, would most likely be home for Christmas. And Todd had his neat cottage on the avenue, and David and his wife were just down the road in the village. But to Walden just now, possessed by the ghost of eighteen-year-old Saffy, it looked like a sad and boring little life, barely enlivened by the prospect of taking the Southern Rail train down to rural Sussex to see her parents next week.

“Why not,” she said. “I’ll join you.”