“Well—” Technically, officially, Walden did not. But what else was she going to do with her time? “Friday morning, then.”

“No mornings this term. I’m leading the night shift,” said Kenning. “Have you got an evening?”

“Thursday,” said Walden, though it was going to eat into her lesson prep time. “We can meet on Thursday evenings. I’ll look forward to it.”

It was Saturday, so she had a single with the Upper Sixth before lunch. Keeping hundreds of children busy at the weekend was one of the great challenges of boarding school life. Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon sports teams and academic societies, Sunday morning chapel—optional, but if you weren’t attending you were expected to be either in the library or on the sports fields—and Sunday afternoon for clubs and excursions, usually to the village but occasionally a larger and more exhausting trip to a zoo or a theatre or a theme park. All of those needed to be supervised, which meant staff didn’t get a full weekend off either. Usually you got either Saturday or Sunday. If you put in for cover early enough and could arrange swaps with enough colleagues, occasionally you managed both.

It wore on people. It even wore on Walden. She always tried to plan her easiest teaching for the week in the Saturday morning single slot.

This week, for example, she had them all doing practice questions for the A-level exam, timed and in silence. This had the double benefit of being extremely good for them—of the four, only Aneeta could be relied on to practise exam technique on her own initiative—while being fairly restful for Walden. She put the Thursday evening meeting with Kenning in her calendar. She replied to some emails. She looked up and said, “Yes, Nikki?”

“It’s about the book you gave me,” Nikki said.

Walden raised her eyebrows. “Does that mean you’ve finished the work I asked you to do?”

“Well, I just—”

“Timed and in silence, Nikki,” Walden said. “Thank you.”

She glanced around at the other three. All of them had their heads down over their work. Mathias’s worksheet had developed some doodled star-shapes in the corner, which meant he’d got stuck somewhere and hadn’t wanted to ask for help. Walden went over and began to speak quietly to him. She was aware, with a teacher’s sixth sense, that Nikki had gone back to work, with a wronged and mutinous air. Well, she might be one of Chetwood’s best, but she was still a teenager, with a teenager’s tendency towards overreaction. She would get over it.

chapter six ANEETA