MY LIFE AS a teacher at St Luke’s began. I’d done my best to put Sylvie’s comment out of my mind and had got myself through training college by imagining Tom’s pride in me on hearing I’d successfully become a teacher. I had no grounds for thinking he would be proud of me, but that didn’t stop me picturing him arriving home from his police training, walking up the Burgess family’s front path, his jacket slung carelessly over one shoulder, whistling. He’d pick Sylvie up and swing her round (in my fantasy, brother and sister were best of friends), then he’d go in the house and peck Mrs Burgess on the cheek and hand her the gift he’d carefully selected (Coty’s Attar of Roses, perhaps, or – more racily – Shalimar), and Mr Burgess would stand in the living room and shake his son’s hand, making Tom blush with pleasure. Only then would he sit at the table, a pot of tea and a Madeira cake set in front of him, and ask if anyone knew how I was getting on. Sylvie would reply, ‘She’s a schoolteacher now – honestly, Tom, you’d hardly recognise her.’ And Tom would smile a secret smile and nod, and he’d swallow his tea with a shake of his head and say, ‘I always knew she was capable of something good.’

I had this fantasy in my mind as I walked up Queen’s Park Road on the first morning of my new job. Although my blood fluttered around my limbs, and my legs felt as though they might buckle at any moment, I walked as slowly as I could in an effort to keep from sweating too much. I’d convinced myself that as soon as term began it would turn cold and possibly wet, so I’d worn a woollen vest and carried a thick Fair Isle cardigan in my hand. In fact, the morning was unnervingly bright. The sun shone on the school’s high bell tower and lit up the red bricks with a fierce glow, and every windowpane glared at me as I walked through the gate.

I’d arrived very early, so there were no children in the yard. The school had been shut for weeks over the summer, but, even so, as I went into the long empty corridor I was immediately assailed by the smell of sweet milk and chalk dust, mixed with children’s sweat, which has a special, soiled aroma all of its own. Every day from then on, I’d come home with this smell in my hair and on my clothes. When I moved my head on the pillow at night, the taint of the classroom shifted around me. I never fully accepted that smell. I learned to tolerate it, but I never ceased to notice it. It was the same with the smell of the station on Tom. As soon as he got back to the house, he’d take off his shirt and have a good wash. I always liked that about him. Though it occurs to me now that he may have left his shirt on for you, Patrick. That you might have liked the bleach and blood stench of the station.

That morning, trembling in the corridor, I looked up at the large tapestry of St Luke on the wall; he stood with an ox behind him and a donkey in front. With his mild face and neatly clipped beard, he meant nothing to me. I thought of Tom, of course, of how he would have stood with his chin set in a determined pose, the way he would have rolled up his sleeves to show his muscled forearms, and I also thought about running home. As I walked along the corridor, my pace gradually increasing, I saw that every door was marked with a teacher’s name, and none of them sounded like a name I knew, or a name I could imagine ever inhabiting. Mr R.A. Coppard MA (Oxon) on one. Mrs T.R. Peacocke on another.

Then: footsteps behind me, and a voice: ‘Hi there – can I help? Are you the new blood?’

I didn’t turn around. I was still staring at R.A. Coppard and wondering how long it would take me to run the length of the corridor back to the main entrance and out on to the street.

But the voice was persistent. ‘I say – are you Miss Taylor?’

A woman whom I judged to be in her late twenties was standing before me, smiling. She was tall, like me, and her hair was strikingly black and absolutely straight. It seemed to have been cut by someone who’d traced the outline of an upturned bowl around her head, just as my father used to do to my brothers. She was wearing very bright red lipstick. Placing a hand on my shoulder, she announced: ‘I’m Julia Harcourt. Class Five.’ When I didn’t respond, she smiled and added: ‘You are Miss Taylor, aren’t you?’

I nodded. She smiled again, her short nose wrinkling. Her skin was tanned, and despite being dressed in a rather outmoded green frock with no waist to speak of and sporting a pair of brown leather lace-ups, there was something rather jaunty about her. Perhaps it was her bright face and even brighter lips; unlike most of the other teachers at St Luke’s, Julia never wore spectacles. I sometimes wondered if the ones who did so wore them mostly for effect, enabling themselves to look over the rims in a fierce way, for example, or take them off and jab them in a wrongdoer’s direction. I’ll admit to you now, Patrick, that during my first year in the school I thought briefly of investing in a pair of glasses myself.

‘The infant school is in another part of the building,’ she said. ‘That’s why you can’t find your name on any of these doors.’ Still holding my shoulder, she added, ‘First day’s always frightful. I was a mess when I started. But you do survive.’ When I didn’t respond, she let her hand drop from my shoulder and said, ‘It’s this way. I’ll show you.’ After a moment spent standing there, watching Julia walk away, swinging her arms by her sides as though she were hiking over the South Downs, I followed her.

Patrick, did you feel like this on your first day at the museum? Like they had meant to employ someone else but due to some administrative error the letter of appointment had been sent to your address? I somehow doubt it. But that’s how I felt. And I was also sure I was about to vomit. I wondered how Miss Julia Harcourt would deal with that, with a grown woman suddenly turning pale and sweaty and throwing up her breakfast all over the polished corridor tiles, splashing the toes of her neat lace-ups.

I didn’t vomit, however. Instead I followed Miss Harcourt out of the junior school and into the infants’, which had its own separate entrance at the back of the building.

The classroom she led me to was bright, and even on that first day I could see this quality was underused. The long windows were half disguised by flowered curtains. I couldn’t see the dust on those curtains at once, but I could smell it. The floor was wooden and not as gleaming as the corridor had been. At the head of the room was the blackboard, on which I could still see the ghost of another teacher’s handwriting – ‘July 1957’ was just visible on the top left-hand side, written in curling capitals. Before the board were a large desk and a chair, next to which was a boiler, encased by wire. At all the rows of low children’s desks there were chipped wooden seats. It seemed depressingly usual, in other words, except for the light trying to get through those curtains.

It wasn’t until I stepped inside (waved on by Miss Harcourt) that I saw the special area of my new classroom. In the corner, behind the door, tucked between the back of the stationery cupboard and the window, were a rug and some cushions. None of the classrooms I’d entered on my training sessions had had this feature, and I daresay I took a step back at the sight of soft furnishings in a school context.

‘Ah yes,’ murmured Miss Harcourt. ‘I believe the woman who was here before you – Miss Lynch – used this area for story time.’

I stared at the red and yellow rug and its matching cushions, which were plump and tassled, and I imagined Miss Lynch surrounded by her adoring brood as she recited Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from memory.

‘Miss Lynch was unorthodox. Rather wonderfully so, I thought. Although there were those that didn’t agree. Perhaps you’d rather it was removed?’ She smiled. ‘We can have the caretaker get rid of it. There’s a lot to be said for sitting at desks, after all.’

I swallowed and finally found enough breath to speak. ‘I’ll keep it,’ I said. My voice sounded very small in the empty classroom. I suddenly realised that all I had to fill this entire space were my words, my voice; and it was a voice over which – I was convinced at that moment – I had very little control.

‘Up to you,’ chirped Julia, turning on her heel. ‘Good luck. See you at break.’ She gave a salute as she closed the door, the tips of her fingers brushing the blunt line of her fringe.

Children’s voices were beginning to sound outside. I considered closing all the windows to keep the sound out, but the sweat I could taste on my top lip prevented me from doing so on such a warm day. I put my bag on top of the desk. Then I changed my mind and put it on the floor. I cracked my knuckles, looked at my watch. A quarter to nine. I paced the length of the room, looking at the distempered bricks, my mind trying to focus on some piece of advice from the training college. Learn their names early on and use them frequently, was all that would come to me. I stopped at the door and peered at the framed reproduction of Leonardo’s The Annunciation hanging above it. What, I wondered, would six-year-old children make of that? Most likely they would admire the muscular wings of the Angel Gabriel, and puzzle over the wispiness of the lily, as I did. And, like me, they probably had very little comprehension of what the Virgin was about to go through.

Beneath the Virgin, the door opened and a little boy with a black fringe that looked like a boot mark stamped on his forehead appeared. ‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

My first instinct was to win his love by saying Yes, oh yes, please do, but I checked myself. Would Miss Harcourt let the boy straight in before the bell went? Wasn’t it insolent for him to address me in this manner? I looked him up and down, trying to guess his intentions. The black boot-mark hair didn’t bode well, but his eyes were light and he kept his feet on the other side of the door jamb.

‘You’ll have to wait,’ I answered, ‘until the bell goes.’

He looked at the floor, and for an awful moment I thought he might give a sob, but then he slammed the door shut and I heard his boots clattering in the corridor. I knew I should haul him back for that; I should shout for him to stop running at once and come back here to receive a punishment. But instead I walked to my desk and tried to calm myself. I had to be ready. I took up the blackboard rubber and cleaned the remains of ‘July 1957’ from the corner of the board. I pulled open the desk drawer and took some paper from it. I might need that, later. Then I decided I should check my fountain pen. Shaking it over the paper, I managed to scatter the desk with black shiny dots. When I rubbed at these, my fingers became black. Then my palms went black as I tried to wipe the ink from my fingers. I walked to the window, hoping to dry the ink in the sunlight.

As I’d been arranging and decorating my desk, the noise of children playing in the yard had been steadily increasing. It was now loud enough, it seemed to me, to threaten to swamp the whole school. A girl standing by herself in the corner of the yard, one plait hanging lower than the other, caught my eye, and immediately I stepped back from the window. I cursed myself for my timidity. I was the teacher. It was she who should move away from my gaze.

Then a man in a grey overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles stepped into the yard and a miracle occurred. The noise ceased completely even before the man blew his whistle. After that, children who’d been screaming with excitement in some game, or sulking under the tree by the school gate, ran and took part in the formation of orderly lines. There was a moment’s pause, and in that moment I heard the footsteps of other teachers along the corridor, the confident clack of other classroom doors opening and closing, and even a woman laughing and saying, ‘Only an hour and a half until coffee time!’ before a door slammed shut.

I stood and faced my own classroom door. It seemed a long way from me, and as the marching children came closer, I took in the scene carefully, hoping to keep this sense of distance uppermost in my mind during the forthcoming minutes. The wave of voices began, gradually, to rise again, but was soon stemmed by a man bellowing ‘Silence!’ There followed the opening of doors and the swish and scrape of boots on wood as children were allowed to enter their classrooms.

It would be wrong, I think, to call what I felt panic. I was not sweating or feeling nauseous, as I had been in the corridor with Julia. Instead, an utter blankness came over me. I could not propel myself forward to open the door for the children, nor could I move behind the desk. Again I thought about my voice, and wondered where exactly it was situated in my body, where I might find it if I were to go looking. I might as well have been dreaming, and I think I did close my eyes for a minute, hoping that when I opened them again it would all become clear to me; my voice would come back and my body would be able to move in the right direction.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a boy’s cheek pressed against the glass panel in the door. But still my limbs would not move, so it was a relief when the door opened and the boot-mark boy asked again, with the hint of a smirk, ‘Can we come in now?’

‘You may,’ I said, turning to the blackboard so I wouldn’t have to watch them appear. All those tiny bodies looking to me for sense, and justice, and instruction! Can you imagine it, Patrick? In a museum, you never face your audience, do you? In a classroom, you face them every day.

As they were filing in, whispering, giggling, scraping chairs, I took up the chalk and wrote, as I’d been taught at college, the day’s date in the left-hand corner of the board. And then, for some strange reason, it struck me that I could write Tom’s name instead of mine. I was so used to writing his name every night in my black book – sometimes a column of Toms would form, and become a wall of Toms, or a spire of Toms – that to do the same so boldly in this public place suddenly seemed entirely possible, and perhaps even sensible. That would shock the little bleeders. My hand hovered over the board and – I couldn’t help it, Patrick – a laugh escaped me. Silence fell on the class as I stifled my guffaw.

A moment passed as I gathered myself, then the chalk touched the slate and began to form letters; there was that lovely, echoey sound – so delicate and yet so definite – as I wrote, in capitals:

MISS TAYLOR.

I stood back and looked at what my hand had written. The letters climbed towards the right-hand side of the board as if they, too, wanted to escape the room.

MISS TAYLOR

—my name from now on, then.

I hadn’t meant to look directly at the rows of faces. I’d meant to fix my eyes on the Virgin above the door. But there they all were, impossible to avoid, twenty-six pairs of eyes turned towards me, each pair utterly different but equally intense. A couple stood out: the boy with the boot-mark hair was sitting on the end of the second row, grinning; in the centre of the front row was a girl with an enormous number of black curls and a face so pale and thin that it took me a second to look away from her; and in the back row was a girl with a dirty-looking bow in the side of her hair, whose arms were crossed tightly and whose mouth was bracketed by deep lines. When I caught her eye she did not – unlike the others – look away from me. I considered ordering her to uncross her arms straight away, but thought the better of it. There’d be plenty of time to tackle such girls, I thought. How wrong I was. Even now I wish I hadn’t let Alice Rumbold get away with it on that first day.