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towards The Tempest , The Mill on the Floss and Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy .
    Lodgers, habitually carless in that wilderness where entitlement culture flourished, continued to loiter on school mornings prepared with gentle requests or more indignant assumptions.
    ‘Any chance of a ride, Dors?’
    ‘Any spare space going?’
    ‘My cat really needs some help,’ said an acupressure practitioner one morning, holding a yowling beast in her arms as she stood expectantly by the car door.
    ‘ Hitch ,’ replied Dora.
    Once at school, she unpacked her instruments, and consulted her schedules. She rubbed cream on to hands that were eternally dry in winter, their soreness exacerbated by rosin, her cello strings pressing into cracked fingertips, and bit at her cold-dried lower lip. She had begun to keep watch, warily: on staffroom movements; on a section of the snow-fringed grounds that was visible from the woodwork room in passing; and on the cars lingering in exhaust billows on the drive.
    She was more aware of her appearance than she had been for half a decade: the plait had gone, lopped inch by inch as she grew older, and her hair’s pale brown ends sat more bluntly on her shoulders. Was she actually attractive? she wondered. Her pigmentation was purely English: light-sensitive, delicately freckle-scattered. Her skin was variable, its susceptibility to outside elements flaring and receding, its thin dryness either subdued with cream and scarves or revealed as a semi-transparent display of emotions and capillaries. She had never used cosmetics in her life. She applied a little plum-flavoured lip gloss filched furtively from Cecilia’s room, noticing with the revelation of novelty how it caught light and suggested youth. Her bluey-green eyes seemed to echo that light, that cold light, suggesting cold depths, despite her outer warmth. She wore her long linen smocks, her corduroy skirts and old silk scarves in the bitterest weather as colleagues arrived in boots and mothy woollen layers or army clothes. If she was being noticed, then she felt compelled to dress well out of instinctive pride, even as she wished to repel the attention.
    Teachers, rimy-eyed or yoga-composed, began drifting into the staffroom.
    ‘You’re looking peaky, darlin’,’ said Kasha, a jazz ballet teacher.
    Cecilia, an oval of a face, long dark red hair, passed the staffroom door at that moment. Dora jumped.
    ‘I’m not ,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’m really not. Just tired.’
    She went about her day, glimpsing her children at various points: Benedict, favouring eyeliner, who had increasingly retreated into the pulsing curtained world of his boarding friends’ bedrooms, those expensive concrete cells in which pupils dozed and smoked during lesson time; Cecilia, who had begun, she thought, to come into her own as she collected her hard-won A-grades and fretted-over B-pluses, and her colouring settled into something richer and less reactive; and Tom, now in the senior school, who ran around happily in his felty jerseys, barely aware of the basics of the syllabus.
    She moved from class to drama practice to staff lunch room to individual lessons, tense and strongly resistant and, despite herself, fascinated – fascinated in the midst of confused aversion – because she knew she was being admired.
     
    ‘Your mum’s looking sexy,’ said Diana casually at the house one night.
    ‘Oh, yuck! She is not ,’ said Cecilia. ‘Please. Yuck.’ She shook her head and the waves of her hair clustered with a shine beneath her shoulders. She stretched out her hand. Diana arched her back. They were sinuous with new vanity.
    ‘She is. Look at her. I’ve never seen her wearing make-up like that.’
    ‘No,’ said Cecilia, a suspicion prodding at her before it faded. She pressed the sparking flipper on her father’s pinball machine in passing as a guarantee of parental solidarity.
    ‘Did you used to dread your parents splitting up?’ she said, pausing