“Yes, of course, and I will, I’ll be in touch more formally to set up a parents’ meeting, I just wanted to give you a personal heads-up, being friends.”

Small manipulations.

“Okay…”

Trifling.

“We’ll do it when Sarah’s available too, of course.” At this, David raised his eyebrow, and Veronica smiled. He knew what she was doing, and she felt an energy pulse through her. Life. Where all day there’d been a lack of it. Still smiling, she began to move towards the door. “I’ll let you get back to your work now. Sorry to have disturbed.”

“Sarah might not be able to make it,” David said suddenly, with what Veronica could see was an attempt at firmness. “But of course, let me know when to come.”

Veronica gritted her teeth and smiled. “The thing is, David, I’ve been noticing rather a lot of things about Amelia lately. You know, some behavioural issues that are, well, unusual, and worth exploring. Today for instance, a lack of awareness of social norms. I’m sure you’ll have observed. And I’ll have to be writing my report soon for the move up to the Junior school next year, so, well I think best if we try to tackle this together first.”

She spoke softly, smoothly, only the glint in her eye betraying anything less than compassion. Eyebrow still raised, David listened to her in silence, watching carefully. She felt sparks ricocheting from his eyes all around the grand room, pulsating inside her, like a secretly bidden strength. Stuff her previous moralising, the manipulations were only small. Trifling. Worth it for this.

She turned. Swept away. As she reached the door, however, David spoke.

“When you see Sarah…” he started abruptly. “At the meeting… Look, she didn’t want to say. But all this talk about when you were kids together, and Eliza, it’s not—”

“It’s not appropriate for school,” Veronica interrupted. “Of course it isn’t. But the meeting’s not about us, is it? I’m thinking only of Amelia.”

Sarah

“What’s ‘material prejudice’?” called Sarah’s leader, a distinguished QC twenty years her elder, spotting her as she strode past his open door towards the stairwell.

Sarah retraced a few steps and stuck her head into his room. Andrew Shonubi was one of the most senior barristers in the chambers and one of the few who still led Sarah on cases. Mostly, these days, she ran her own. “Anything, I suppose, above de minimis prejudice. There must be a tangible effect.”

“But it can never be tested. It’s a hypothetical.”

Sarah entered the room and sat down. Andrew’s office was a high ceilinged, book-lined haven with vast bay windows overlooking the garden in the middle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Just outside of Lincoln’s Inn itself (one of the four Inns of Court), it remained a stone’s-throw from The Temple, and embedded enough to retain the feel of an Oxbridge college. All stone walls and sweeping arches, for Sarah, this had felt a natural progression, but there was a junior barrister new to their chambers who’d joined them from Birmingham University and before that a comprehensive in South London, and he’d remarked many times on the oddness of it all, as though he’d walked through the Narnia wardrobe and found himself in an unrecognisable realm. Was there prejudice in that, in the void between backgrounds? Was it material?