Tony followed her gaze to where she had indicated with an incline of her head and saw Alice standing in the queue. She’d stretched a little across the term, and her father had made allowance for such a change by unstitching the hem of her skirt. While it sat now across her thighs, the line from the previous fold was still evident, as were the dangling of threads from the frayed edge of the hem, which had once been hidden. Her jumper, which she’d pulled down over her hands, carried marks of green paint on the elbow and red splotches further up the sleeve.

‘She’d hardly a walking advertisement for coming here, is she?’

Alice, mistaking the attentions of the faces ranged against her, lifted a timid hand and waved at Tony. ‘Hello, sir,’ she mouthed, and smiled brightly.

‘You’ve a fan,’ the tech teacher said.

‘She’s a good girl,’ Tony said. ‘Give her a break. She gets a hard enough time from the kids.’

‘You’d think her mother would dress her right,’ someone commented.

‘Her mother’s dead,’ Tony said.

The afternoon session was the quieter of the two. Tony’s anger had hardened now, moving beyond his indignation from this morning to a more settled resentment for what Karen had done and her failure to admit it.

‘What books do you do?’ one parent in the final group asked. She’d already spent several minutes scanning the display of texts they had set up on the tables which ran the gamut of Literature, both English and Scottish.

‘All of these,’ he said, nodding to the display.

‘Anything else?’

Tony frowned. There were, after all, almost thirty books on the table, many of which, truth be told, would not be seen again until this time the following year when the school would spruce itself up and put on its finest display for the next prospective cohort.

‘King Lear,’ he offered, speculatively.

‘Is that not a bit hard for the younger ones?’

‘We wouldn’t do it with the younger ones.’

‘Then what would you do?’

Tony regarded her more closely. She was trim, neat, with pinched features. She clasped the prospectus for the school tightly between arm and side while she clasped her hands in front of her. She bent a little at the waist. For a moment, Tony had the impression she was a nun, were it not for the two children with whom she’d arrived who were taking turns kicking one another behind her. The elder sibling offered his crotch for the younger to kick, which he did with some vigour.

‘I don’t know. Depends on the class, really. Some Bernard McLaverty maybe.’

She shook her head to indicate she didn’t recognise the name.

‘He’s an Irish writer living in Scotland.’

‘I can see why you’d like him,’ the woman commented. ‘With your accent.’