Scrubs, fenced by lacework scaffolding. The dark rectangle of quasi-Brutalist ambition stark against the white sky. This place was Chetwood, as much as the old stone colonnade and the lofty chapel. Chetwood at its occasional best, with an eye on the future, embracing the startling modern innovations of concrete, the middle school, and women’s education. Universal House. Walden stood with her hands in her pockets looking up at it.

I am here, she thought. I am also here.

At eleven—thirteen—fifteen—eighteen. Leaving her bed unmade and getting told off for it. Engaged in elaborate, vital, hard-to-remember interpersonal drama with her Year Eight dorm. Dyeing her hair to ashy chemical blonde in a student bathroom. I am here. Sneaking out to summon a great demon. Taking the job interview tour. Patrolling for curfew breakers. Making a brief, friendly appearance at NQT drinks in Lilly Tibbett’s flat this year.

I am here, long before I was here: because the beauty of school was its predictability, the sheer weight of institution carving patterns into the world, stronger than blood or bone. I am here, because other children had slept in those dormitories before her. I am here, in the old boarding houses, exiled from all love, weeping with cold and loneliness. I am here, reciting principles of magic and mathematics and Latin grammar, giving adults rude nicknames whether they called themselves teachers or masters or magisters; finding small ways to break the rules of how to be, rules that changed and changed and yet remained forever the same unforgiving edifice of authority. I am here, in the masters and magisters, the well-intentioned and the cruel, the competent and the hopeless, the shattered war veteran drinking steadily in his study or the mediaeval jobbing wizard checking his astrological tables before he went back to reckoning the bills. I am here, like the ghost of the Headmaster killed by a higher demon in 1926. I am here, like a succession of imps in the staffroom photocopier.

I am here, adult and child, new and old, deeply rooted, never failing, with all the silent force of centuries of repetition.

I am here: the green fields. Here: the white sky.

Here I am, more real than real, more alive than alive.

I am here even in the January snowdrops.

She waited. She did not know what she was waiting for.

“Funny weather,” said Mark to his companion as he emerged from Scrubs’s front door. He was his usual self, smart casual, expensive haircut, very good shoes. Only slightly dishevelled, in the easy way of a man who never really lost control of appearances. Lilly Tibbett, twenty-two years old and newly qualified, who lived in a flat on the ground floor and had the makings of a very good teacher eventually, was still pink with exertion. She had thrown her blonde hair into a quick ponytail and she was looking up at Mark with the unmistakeable, pitiable gaze of the besotted.