“She’s my neighbor. She lives in the cottage over there, and she came to introduce herself the evening after I moved in. She’s a writer. She would know about school, and she never said a thing about it. Quite the contrary. I told her I was working in the boatyard, and she said that must be nice, and how boats were like fairy tales, or poetry, or something.”

“Well, let’s ask her, then,” said Lotti.

“It won’t make a slightest difference,” said Albert, but it was too late. Lotti had slithered off the roof onto the towpath and was marching away toward Clara Primrose’s cottage.

Ben jumped off the rear deck and went after her. All Albert could do was follow.

Chapter Five

Clara was confused. All these months living in solitude, and suddenly her little front garden was crowded with people she hadn’t invited, all talking at the same time; her neighbor Ben and a policeman, and the girl who was always hanging around the Sparrowhawk, who had stolen the Chihuahua. Clara didn’t want them here, but how could she get rid of them? In the background, she heard the five o’clock train whistle as it pulled into the station. She had a sudden vision of Max on the train, Max walking from the station, Max arriving while all these people were here quarreling, when she had waited for him all this time in perfect isolation. Perhaps if she cried they might go away. But Clara, in her former life as a student, had agreed with her friend Kitty that women who cried to get what they wanted were despicable.

“Better to be very, very haughty,” Kitty had said.

Clara pushed her glasses back up her nose.

“I have no idea what you are all doing here,” she announced, as grandly as you can in a sweater worn back to front, and a moth-eaten one at that. “But I’d be much obliged if you would leave.”

Albert, shouting above Lotti in a not very dignified attempt to be heard, informed her that children had to go to school.

“But what does that have to do with me?” asked Clara.

“Nothing,” said Albert, whose headache was getting worse.

“Tell him the law’s wrong,” ordered Lotti.

“What law?”

“The law that says they have to remain in education until they are fourteen,” grumbled Albert Skinner.

“Is there such a law?”

“You see?” Albert turned to Lotti. “She doesn’t know.”

He felt triumphant, and at the same time also a little ashamed of being so pleased at having proved a child wrong, but both feelings turned to aggravation as he realized Lotti didn’t look the least bit defeated.

“Remain in education until they’re fourteen,” she repeated. “That is what you said, isn’t it?”

Albert wrinkled his brow. She was up to something, he could tell, but what?