Sometime in the winter, they had been taking tea in the rooms off the school where Miss Gardiner – ‘Call me Cecily’ – lodged. It had been late afternoon and getting dark. The teacher was leaning over the grill, toasting bread, and in the inadequate yellow light of the primitive kitchen area, Verity noticed the lines around Miss Gardiner’s eyes. She had thought of her as someone romantic, her lover killed in the war (his picture was on the mantelpiece, staring into the camera, serious and very young), and rather glorious in a ballet dancer kind of way. Though they had no proof whatsoever, the girls at school had often speculated that the mistress had been in the Resistance or something else exciting.

‘Miss Gardiner – Cecily,’ she said, plunging forward, ‘do you ever feel as if there is more to life than being stuck out here in Norfolk?’

At first, Miss Gardiner didn’t move. There was the slightest contraction in her thin neck. She turned and said cheerfully, ‘Oh, but my dear, I know there is. I have travelled, you know. Before the war. To Paris and Florence and Rome. It was our Grand Tour. My friends and I were rather intrepid, you know. The Uffizi, the Louvre. All of it.’

‘God, I wish I could do that. Father would never let me.’

‘Then you must find another way.’

For a while they were silent, eating toast and drinking tea. Daringly, because this was her old teacher after all, Verity lit a cigarette and sat happily sated in a warm fug of smoke.

‘But why did you end up here of all places?’

‘My family found me the position, after the war.’

A veil had come down. Verity was stupid to have asked. Then the mistress reached over and held Verity’s hand hard as if she was going to embrace it.

‘You really should go and see the world, my dear. Don’t wait.’

There was a hunger and a desperation in Miss Gardiner’s primly lovely face. Suddenly, Verity wanted to jump up and leave, as if the sadness of lost chances she smelt on the mistress would catch and infect her too.

*

It was a late afternoon of swooning heat. She hadn’t been to tea at Cecily Gardiner’s for months now. She felt guilty but dismissed it, shucking off any sense of obligation she couldn’t bear to feel. Her mother had made her like this – unable to connect with anyone, unable to find a real friend. There was some coldness, some distancing in her that had contaminated Verity too. Only Arthur had ever come close, and now, what was he?