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well,” said Colin. “But what’s in it for us?”
    â€œLike I said, it’s someone who’s interested in us. It’s like another home life—and we don’t get much home life here. And Lydia’s an education in herself.”
    Colin pursed his lips. He had meant by his question something much more concrete, but on reflection he decided to keep his own counsel. Colin, so apparently open and artless, was yet a lad who was very good at keeping his own counsel.
    In Ted the interest in their burgeoning friendship with Lydia Perceval ran parallel with a concern for their mother. That evening, when she had dragged herself upstairs to yet another early bed, he said to his father:
    â€œDad, don’t you think Mum may be ill?”
    Nick Bellingham shook his head with the decisiveness that was characteristic of him, and which hid a congenital uncertainty.
    â€œNo. She’s just exhausted after the move. She never wanted to move up here anyway. She’s just getting back at me.”
    â€œEither she’s exhausted or she’s getting back at you,” said Colin cockily.
    â€œThat’s enough of your lip!” shouted Nick.
    â€œI think you’re wrong, Dad,” said Ted. “I think it’s physical. I think she should go and see a doctor.”
    â€œCrap!” said Nick, banging his hand on the arm of his chair. “There’s nothing wrong with your mother. She should make an effort, snap out of it. Anyway, who’s stopping her seeing a doctor?”
    Nick Bellingham’s air of decisiveness was in fact often a cover for the fact that he liked to keep all his options open and tried to face all possible directions at once. Ted silently decided that it was up to him to persuade his mother to see a doctor, because no one else would.
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    Andy Hoddle took to teaching like a duck to water, or so he told himself. His colleagues told him he was having an easy ride: end of term was near, the general atmosphere throughout the school was relaxed, and many of the kids he was teaching were aware there was a lot of catching-up to do. Andy found a way of mixing new material with a thoroughgoing revision of older stuff that did not imply a criticism of his pregnant predecessor. Inevitably there were the usual troublesome children, the usual bored ones, but most of them he found bright and interested.
    Andy thrived.
    He did not see that a parents’ evening presented him with any special problems. All the visitors would know that he was new, and would not expect him to have identified their Johnny or their Katey. In fact several of the parents made a point of coming up and saying that they hoped he would stay at the school as long as possible, that their Johnny or their Katey had been enthusiastic about their Physics class for the first time, that they hoped he realised there was a lot of groundwork still to cover, and so on and so on. It was all ratherflattering, and made him feel wanted, made him feel he was doing a good job. He got on well with his new colleagues, which added to his confidence. They were the sort of hard-pressed, well-meaning people he could identify with, feel kinship with. One of them was giving him a lift home, and they were meeting up with Thea in The Wheatsheaf for a pint or two after the exhaustions of the evening.
    It was late in the parents’ evening when he was approached by Nick Bellingham.
    â€œWould you be the new science teacher?”
    â€œThat’s right,” said Andy.
    â€œNick Bellingham’s the name,” he said, extending his hand. “I’d like to have a word about Ted and Colin.”
    â€œAh.”
    The man sat down hard on the chair in front of Andy’s desk, legs apart, and slapped his hands down on his thighs. Thus did industrial magnates behave in plays about the nineteenth-century North. Andy registered that he was watching a performance, but was unsure whether it was