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chapter fourteen

NOVEMBER

Half term was gone. The students were back. Chetwood sprang to life again, empty halls filled with chatter, empty classrooms with clutter, empty dormitories with interpersonal drama. The people Walden envied least in all the school were the Heads of Year. She took my mascara—That’s my mascara!—Well I heard he said to her that she said something mean about me because so-and-so told her that I—

And the real problems, of course, mixed up with the ordinary chaos of humans living with other humans. Pastoral work was listening, patiently, so patiently, for the signal through the noise: the bullying hidden under of layers of He’s a loner, though, isn’t he, the academic struggle underlying I didn’t let her copy me, Miss, she just took a photo when I wasn’t looking —listening, thinking, and above all watching for the truest danger sign among teenagers: the sudden change. Who has gone quiet when they used to be loud, or loud and disruptive when they used to be quiet? Who has lost weight rapidly, who has given up doing their homework, who has developed mysterious bruises and then abruptly quit the swimming squad? The underlying causes—growth spurt, new friend group with bad study habits, clumsiness and coincidence; or eating disorder, depression, peer-on-peer abuse?

It happened at Chetwood, as it happened everywhere. Parents could spend a fortune trying to future-proof their children, but no one could make them entirely safe from the present.

It was November, the start of Autumn II, the worst half term of the academic year. Eight long uninterrupted weeks until the Christmas break, waking in the dark, going to bed in the dark, spending the brief hours of sunlight trapped in offices and meeting rooms and classrooms. Now came the dreary slog through the worst parts of the curriculum. Children learned incrementally; skills took time to develop; you had to put the hardest stuff as late as possible in a two-year course while still leaving yourself time to revise and consolidate before the public examinations in summer. What it always came down to was a block of hell with your exam sets in late November. Over and over in the staffroom you could hear teachers saying to each other, “If we can just get through it all by mocks!” Mock examinations, in January, were worse than the actual GCSEs and A-levels, because the students had a fraction of the time to revise almost the same amount of material. Year Eleven looked frazzled, and Year Thirteen grim, as the dark times bore down on them.

Upper Sixth Invocation had to master the fourth-order practical before the mocks whether they liked it or not, as well as covering triple arrays and advanced exorcism. It was a wan, unenthusiastic group who greeted Walden in the seminar room for their first theory lesson of the half term. Mathias had his head down, meticulously drawing more ballpoint geometric patterns on the dotted inside cover of his lever arch folder. Aneeta kept fidgeting with her glasses. Nikki was not taking notes and not asking questions. She sat by the window and looked out at the grey morning as if she was hoping the classroom would disintegrate into the clouds. Will turned up late enough that Walden gave him a demerit, laughed too loudly at the atmosphere, and attempted a few jibes of banter which, unusually for him, were misjudged badly enough to cross the line from ‘schoolboy nonsense’ to ‘actively nasty.’ Just as Walden began—“Highly inappropriate, Will, I am not impressed, and that’s another demerit”—Nikki turned away from the window and said explosively, “Could you maybe just not be such a shit all the time?”

“Wow, okay, aggressive much,” began Will, and Nikki abruptly stood up, grabbed her schoolbag, and then—oh, Walden’s heart went out to her—managed a tight and miserable little, “Sorry, Dr Walden, I’m just—sorry,” before she gave up and fled the classroom.

“I’ll go,” said Aneeta at once, getting up to follow her, leaving all her things on the desk.

Walden immediately and automatically did the necessary mental calculations. Objectively, both Nikki and Aneeta could afford to miss a short section of a lesson—they were conscientious, ambitious young women, and Walden had already given out the booklet she’d written for the class on triple arrays. Both of them could probably teach themselves the theory from there. In fact, Nikki had already taught herself the theory, hadn’t she? It had been a triple array, competent but simply not strong enough, that had stood at the heart of Old Faithful’s incursion. So Nikki taking a moment out of the room was not an academic problem.

And with teenagers, as well, there was the question of dignity. No one wanted to have an emotional breakdown in front of an authority figure and a classroom of their peers. A comforting hug from a friend in the girls’ toilets, and a chance to fix her makeup and gather her pride before returning to the lesson, might be exactly what Nikki needed.

Or it might not.

Walden swept briskly into the next segment of the lesson she’d planned, a formal introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of the triple array, with one eye on the clock. Five minutes. Seven. She’d meant to do some group Q-and-A to check their fundamentals before moving on to notation. Will kept glancing at the door. Ten minutes. Walden rapidly reorganised the lesson plan in her head. “All right, Will, Mathias, let’s have you two on the same table. I want you to collaborate and work through this problem sheet”—after a few years teaching you were always ready with spares of everything—“revising double arrays, before we carry on with the triples.”

“I think we did this one last year,” said Will, looking at the first question.

“You did. I still have your marks in my mark book. Let’s see if you’ve improved. I’m just going to check if everything’s quite all right.”

Provided you knew where they were, and you’d told them what they were supposed to be doing, it was acceptable in a pinch to leave sixth formers to get on with some work by themselves. If it had been a Year Seven who’d disappeared from Walden’s lesson, she’d have had to email the school office to go hunting—because if you left a classroom of Year Sevens unsupervised, you had only yourself to blame when they invented a fun game of Jumping On The Desk to Touch the Ceiling, No I Don’t Know Why It Broke or the ever-popular Throwing Our Shoes Out the Window, No I Don’t Know Where They Landed.

Corridor empty. The nearest girls’ toilets were round the corner in the Humanities block. Walden was giving herself five minutes to find Nikki and Aneeta, and if she couldn’t do it in that time, she was alerting the office to do a sweep.

It took two minutes. Nikki and Aneeta were not in the girls’ toilets, but Walden followed a hunch and knocked on the closed door of the disabled toilet next to it, and they were in there, curled up on the floor in the corner together like two sad kittens in smart skirts and blazers. Nikki had her head in her arms. “It’s okay,” Aneeta was saying, “it’s going to be okay, all right? Shh, shh, you’re okay.”

She was such a kind, thoughtful, good-hearted young person, and she was obviously doing her very best to support her friend. But to Walden’s experienced eye this looked like it was above a fellow teenager’s pay grade. Eye level, she thought, and crouched next to them. “Nikki?”

“She’s all right, Dr Walden, she just needs a moment,” said Aneeta protectively.

“Nikki, can you talk to me?”

A moment went past. Nikki shook her head without lifting it from the cradle of her arms. Then she said, muffled, “Dr Walden, I’m really sorry, can I—can I go to the nurse?”

“I’ll look after her,” said Aneeta at once.

Problems, priorities: an A-level lesson on a key topic still in progress, Will and Mathias alone in the seminar room, Aneeta trying to take on too much responsibility, Nikki an emotional wreck on the floor of the disabled toilet. Walden was not formally on the pastoral team. She didn’t even have a registration group—when would she have time? The chain of command for Nikki’s current state went form tutor, head of sixth form, pastoral deputy head—which was Ebele. But every child was every adult’s responsibility. “I’m going to walk you down to the nurse, Nikki,” Walden said, “and then I’m going to put my head round the door of the pastoral office and let Matron know what’s going on, all right? Aneeta, if you go back to the lesson, the others will explain the revision sheet we’re doing.”

Early in her career, Walden had still been sensitive to awkwardness. Interactions between adults and children were so often so awkward. They lived in the same world as you—exactly the same world, the same corridors and classrooms, the same bells ringing out the hours of the timetable—and yet in a world that was nothing like yours at all. The difference between a schoolchild and a schoolteacher, one of Walden’s mentors had once remarked, is that a teacher who finds herself miserable at school can leave.

Fourteen years, that was the length of a modern English education: Reception to Year Thirteen. Fourteen years of corridors, classrooms, bells. Fourteen years of rules and restrictions and uniform requirements. Fourteen years of being told what to do. It was not surprising that children sometimes behaved badly at school. It was not surprising that they refused to do the work, or had emotional outbursts; that they made nasty jokes, or looked at you now and then with a silent, resentful sneer. You had a great deal of power, and they had almost none. You had many choices, and they had very few. The truth was that school—especially boarding school—could be a bit like the old joke about marriage: fine, for people who like living in institutions.

Walden’s teaching persona, her mask, was a necessary shield. It created a wall of distance between herself and the young people she taught and listened to and genuinely cared for. It let her glide untouched past jokes and sneers, and stand serene above the outbursts and the awkward moments. But eventually the mortar in the wall began to crumble. You could not maintain the same kind of distance with sixth form that you held on to with the middle school. They came back after their GCSEs out of the red uniform jumpers, wearing the smart clothes which they had chosen themselves, and you reframed them in your mind: adults, almost. Normal people. Think of yourself at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—were you really so different now?

But oh, it was awkward. When you lost the mask, you lost the scripts that belonged to it. Walking down the corridor beside Nikki—Nikki still looking crumpled and tearstained—Walden was terribly aware, and terribly sorry, that she could think of absolutely nothing worthwhile to say.

School corridors during lesson time never lost their uncomfortably liminal quality. Passing the closed doors of busy classrooms, Walden glimpsed colleagues at work, children with their hands up or with their heads down over exercise books; but out here, just their two sets of footsteps in the hush, and the wall displays in need of touching up, and the persistent smell of floor cleaner.

The infirmary was on the ground floor of New House, opposite the sixth form common room. The front half of the room was a cross between a doctor’s waiting room and an admin office. Curtains blocked off the beds in the back half. The school nurse was behind the desk packing a medical kit with spare inhalers—Walden couldn’t remember which trip exactly was going out this week. She looked up when Walden and Nikki came in, gave Walden the polite greeting that her status in the school hierarchy demanded, and immediately took over looking after Nikki—sitting her down, getting her a glass of water, asking friendly, inane questions just to get her talking. She was an expert, of course, on how to deal kindly and helpfully with a child who was having a bad day. Walden felt a little sting of professional envy for the skill that she did not have. “I’m just going to pop in and see Matron—I’ll let her know Nikki’s here.”

“Dr Walden,” said Nikki, suddenly and a little too loudly. Walden paused in the doorway.

Nikki took a deep breath—gathering courage. She lifted her chin. “Dr Walden,” she said, “I think I should drop.”

Walden stared at her.

“Invocation, I mean,” Nikki said. “I think I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t do the A-level actually. I’m sorry—it’s not that you’re not a good teacher—you’re really good,” as if she thought Walden might take this personally, as if the problem with one of Chetwood’s brightest dropping one of her three A-level subjects in November of Year Thirteen was that her teacher’s feelings would be hurt. “I just think—I thought really—I think I shouldn’t do magic anymore. So. I thought I should tell you.”

Stall, thought Walden instantly. “Nikki, I disagree with you,” she said—best to start clear and firm—“but I think we should have a proper conversation about this at a better time. The process for dropping subjects”—is that you don’t, not this late in the game—“is a whole system, and I am not the person who makes the final decision.” That would be the Head and the decision was going to be ‘no.’ “We’ll discuss it at the right time. Let me just get Matron for you before I have to rush back to the classroom.”

Ebele’s New House office was one of the most pleasant spaces in the school. It was in origin another intimidating wood-panelled box, but Ebele had been fierce with redecoration: antique oil paintings swapped out for student artwork, soft cushioned chairs in white around a modern coffee table, the obligatory computer desk and filing cabinets hidden in the back corner and kept impeccably clear. A pastoral deputy head was not a therapist or a doctor, not a detective or a judge, but the job involved elements of all of those. This was the room where the worst problems came, and the worst conversations took place. The phone next to the desk was where Ebele made the calls to parents, to the county council, in the worst case to the police: I believe this child to be in immediate danger.

Luckily, Ebele was not in a meeting. Walden could see her sitting at her desk, wearing a sunny yellow dress and chunky woollen cardigan—a performance of good cheer and matronly kindness as surely as Walden’s blazer and brooch and A-line skirt were a performance of traditional status and expertise. Just because you were performing, it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Walden knocked and went in. “I’ve just dropped off Nikki at the nurse,” she said.

Ebele’s smile of welcome gave way at once to concern. “How bad is it?”

“She’s going to pieces,” Walden said frankly. “Walked out of our first lesson, and she just asked me if she can drop the A-level. She can’t.”

“Oh, Nikki, ” said Ebele, with deep sympathy. “All right, I’ll go and check on her. We did a lot of talking over half term, that girl and I. Not enough, perhaps.”

“We’re not going to let her throw her future away over this.”

“Of course not,” Ebele said, and Walden realised with a start that she was on the receiving end of the soothing pastoral voice right now. She must look shaken, or worried, or— How embarrassing. But Ebele smiled at her comfortingly. “Don’t worry, Saffy. She’s been through a lot. And she’s a proud girl, very serious, very thoughtful, she doesn’t like to make mistakes. It’s perfectly normal to have some wobbles.”