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could they guess? If you could only listen to yourself sometimes. Lies, lies, lies. You’ll strangle yourself with them one day. Do you know, you make me sick sometimes, physically sick.’
    He looked down at her again, shaking his head from side to side as if she were a disappointing child.
    ‘I’ll sleep in the spare room tonight.’
    ‘Oh, please don’t sulk. I can’t stand it when you sulk.’
    ‘And I hate it when you lie, Helen!’
    The spare room was at the end of the long hallway, a small, cold space. She watched him walk slowly down to it and open the door. Then he turned back to her,his face suddenly losing that mad mask and assuming another, a softer one, one full of quiet concern.
    ‘Go to bed, darling. You should not be getting yourself upset like this, it’s bad for you. Go on, you’re tired and it’s late. I’ll see you in the morning.’
    He smiled a big blue-eyed-boy smile and yet he remained impervious to her hurt and huge eyes that were spilling such great watery drops they would have shamed other men to swift apology. His beautiful, lean body disappeared into the bedroom and he shut the door quietly behind him, which somehow seemed more of a rejection than if he had slammed it in her face.

Chapter 3
    Barnsley School for Girls, 1977
    Latin was most categorically not a dead language, but in the past few moments Gloria Ramsay had most definitely heard it contemplating suicide. It was not so much 2F’s collective declension of the noun urbs with the let’s-try-it-on omission of the genitive plural ‘i’ which turned the correct pronunciation of oor-be-um into a very relished HER-BUM, it was more that it was delivered in a broad Liverpudlian accent which would have had Caesar spinning in his tomb.
    Her mental harrumph! was almost audible, but in fairness to the girls, Mr Walton had been their only source of intonation before he was held at Customs on his way back home from holidaying in Turkey. Yes, this confirmed her theory that Latin was not the sort of subject young men with regional accents, flared trousers and hippy shoulder bags who consulted the I Ching in the staffroom should be teaching. It belonged to those whose respect for the language was reflected in the sobriety and gravitas of their personal lives. These young male teachers were too much of a distraction to the girls and should never have been allowed into her school–as she thought of it. Old-fashioned and ‘past it’, oh yes, she was quite aware that this new wave of trendy teachers labelledher ‘Miss Rameses’, but surely here was the proof–as the class pronounced men-sas MENZ-ARSE –that her theories were grounded in intelligence and not prejudice .
    She shuffled the girls like a pack of cards, breaking their social suits, splicing the good hearts and the diamonds into the black groups of clubs and spades, sending the knaves out to the four corners of the room.
    ‘This is where you will sit from now on,’ Miss Ramsay announced to the sea of disgruntled faces and accompanying whingeing ripple of, ‘Aw, Missssss.’
    ‘Again: men-sa, men-sa, men-sam,’ she encouraged in her ripe and rounded tones.
    There was more than a cheeky hint of over-pronunciation from Elizabeth Collier, but even that was an improvement. Little monkeys like her were no match for Gloria Ramsay with her forty years’ teaching experience tucked under her brown plastic belt. Elizabeth was a very bright girl, though a little unruly–too much of her older sister Beverley in her, that was the problem. She would benefit from being seated with the gentle influence of Dr Luxmore’s daughter, Helen, quietly intelligent, if a little scatterbrained, and Janey Lee, for steady, deliberate ballast–a consistent ‘A’ for effort if not achievement. Together they made a very suitable triumvirate, although not a popular one, if their three faces, oddly similar with their masks of displeasure at this new grouping arrangement, were anything to go